Semifinalists Announced/Recap on Preliminaries

After two grueling rounds today, semifinalists have been determined!

There are fifty semifinalists, and that is a first in such as very long time!
http://internal.spellingbee.com/files/spellingbee.com/semifinalists.pdf

This is Utah's second year advancing to semifinals, and the first time a speller from the Salt Lake Valley has gone this far! Go Vismaya Kharkar! She has competed in the Salt Lake Valley Spelling Bee since it first began in 2009. I think she placed ninth her first year, sixth the second year, and she finally made it in 2011 and 2012). Last year she did not advance to semifinals, but one of her fellow Utah spellers did.

Both five-peats, Nicholas Rushlow and Rahul Malayappan advanced to semifinals.

Two of three Canadians: Jennifer Mong and Mignon Tsai will be on stage tomorrow.

Two of three 2011 Championship Finalists: Nabeel Rahman and Arvind Mahankali will be vying for that trophy.

Vanya Shivashankar will be heading to semifinals! She is the sister of 2009 Champion, Kavya Shivashankar!

There is one speller who is at the national bee for his first time: Jae Canetti. He did very well in 2010 (fourth) and 2011 (second) at his local bee, and he finally came to nationals this year! He started competing as a second grader, and he was also in the same local bee as Tim Ruiter back in 2010. Tim tied for second at the 2009 National Spelling Bee which made him a favorite to win in 2010, even if he did not.

I also have to congratulate Speller #238, as well, because she commented on my blog on one of my posts. Congratulations, Abigail Spitzer, and good luck tomorrow!

Preliminaries Recap

I was only able to watch the first half of Round 2 before heading to school. During my first period today, we did not do anything, so I followed the results on the Bee website. There were many known words, but there were some I had never heard of before. A lot of the words came from Spell It! apparently, then the rest came from the Sponsor Bee Guide. I am about to watch the replays of the Bee, but I will post on what I had while I was watching.

Before one of the spellers received her word, there was a long pause. That must have been very nerve-wracking for her, but she got through her word flawlessly, and she will be going to semifinals!

The sentences were pretty hilarious this year. One of them was with the word irrepressible. "...irrepressible urge to shout "Hi, Mom and Dad!"

I have been impressed with the Jamaicans at the National Spelling Bee. Every single speller from there has had amazing manners, such as "Please" and "Thank You, Sir". Great job on keeping that up, Gifton Wright, and good luck tomorrow!

Great job, Vanya on using your knowledge of roots on debellation!

Since I'm from Utah, I should post the words the the spellers from my state spelled in Rounds 2 and 3.

Round 2:
Jared Ward: etesian
Sophie Choate: mellifluous
Vismaya Kharkar: kielbasa


Round 3:
Jared Ward: rayonnant
Sophie Choate: amniocentesis 
Vismaya Kharkar: Requiem 


I was just watching speller #126 in Round 3 when he received the word idiosyncratically. When he realized that he misspelled the word, he just started to mix in a bunch of random letters and numbers. That is the best mess-up I have ever seen so far in all the years of the Bee! This was what he spelled: i-o- (he knew he messed up) q-r-s-z-3-4 (he said cuatro) - f-l-v-r-q. I think this is funnier than sardoodledom!
Good luck to the fifty spellers heading to semifinals tomorrow!