An eighth grader at Bright Horizon Academy in San Diego advanced to the fifth round of the Scripps National Spelling Bee Wednesday in National Harbor, Maryland by correctly spelling shinplaster, a piece of privately issued paper currency especially one poorly secured and depreciated in value.
Duaa Ouznali was among 99 spellers from the original field of 243 competing in the quarterfinals after scoring high enough on the third-round written test administered to contestants who had correctly spelled their first- round word correctly and provided the correct answer to the second-round vocabulary question.
The scores of the written test were not released. Those who scored at least 13 on the test advanced to the quarterfinals, bee organizers said. The maximum score was 35.
Under bee rules, spellers were grouped by their number of correct answers. The number of spellers of advancing was determined by identifying the group whose minimum score resulted in as close to 100 quarterfinalists as possible.
The field was 165 entering the written test.
Duaa is set to be the 13th speller to take the stage at Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center for the fifth round. The quarterfinals are set to begin at 5 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time and run through 9:45 a.m. They will be streamed on Bounce XL, Grit Xtra, Laff More and spellingbee.com.
The semifinals are scheduled for 5-7 p.m. PDT and will be streamed on the same platforms and televised by ION.
Duaa correctly spelled telegnosis, a noun meaning knowledge of distant happenings obtained by occult or unknown means, in Tuesday's first round.
In the second round, she was asked a vocabulary question, to define "malfeasance," and she correctly chose an act of wrongdoing.
Duaa qualified for the national bee by winning by the San Diego County Scripps Regional Spelling Bee in March, correctly spelling droshky, a public carriage used in Russia, to end the 27-round competition.
Duaa's participation in the national bee means she will be unable to attend her school's promotion ceremony Wednesday but received "her own high school send off" last week, 10News reported.
The 13-year-old's interests include reading and learning trivia, according to biographical information supplied by bee organizers. She has a fondness for writing short stories and learning about languages. Duaa is a practitioner of the Korean martial art taekwondo and swims.
Duaa's favorite animals are cats and favorite school subject is math.
The bee began with spellers from all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Department of Defense schools and five nations outside the United States — the Bahamas, Canada, Ghana, Kuwait and Nigeria.
There were 42 spellers eliminated in the first round and 18 in the second.
The bee is limited to students who have not have passed beyond the eighth grade or an international equivalent on or before Aug. 31, 2024, and who were born on Sept. 1, 2009, or later.
The bee will conclude Thursday. The winner will receive $50,000 from the Scripps National Spelling Bee, $2,500 and a reference library from the dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster, $400 in reference works from Encyclopedia Britannica including a 1768 Encyclopedia Britannica replica set and a three- year membership to Britannica Online Premium.
This is the 100th anniversary of the first national spelling bee which was on June 17, 1925, when the Louisville Courier-Journal invited other newspapers around the country to hold spelling bees and send their champions to Washington, D.C.
This is the 97th edition of the bee. There were no bees in 1943, 1944 and 1945 because of World War II and in 2020 because of the coronavirus pandemic.
San Diego County has produced two national spelling bee champions — Anurag Kashyap in 2005 and Snigdha Nandipati in 2012.
