Schools
RivCo Kid Takes On Big Words, Big Stage In National Spelling Bee
Lara Randhawa, 12, of Corona is still in the running, and is eyeing finals at the ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex near Orlando, Florida.
CORONA, CA — The quarterfinals of the 93rd Scripps National Spelling Bee will be held Tuesday with a 12-year-old from Corona among the 74 remaining competitors from the original field of 207.
Lara Randhawa began the competition Saturday by correctly spelling apocryphal. She then correctly answered the word meaning question, "What is a platitude?" by choosing a trite remark or insipid truism.
Lara completed her spelling for the day by correctly spelling euryphagous — an adjective meaning feeding on a wide variety of foods.
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Saturday's preliminaries consisted of three rounds of oral competition, which took 11 1/2 hours to complete. There were 69 spellers who misspelled their first-round word, reducing the field to 138.
The field was further cut to 110 after the second round and 74 after the third.
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The quarterfinals will be televised by the streaming service ESPN3 from 9 a.m.-3 p.m. All spellers spelling both words correctly and correctly answering the word meaning question will advance to the semifinals, which will be held June 27.
All competition through the semifinals will be held on a virtual basis because of the coronavirus pandemic. The top 10-12 finalists will travel to the ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex near Orlando, Florida, for the finals, which will be held July 8.
The quarterfinals will consist of three rounds and be completed one round at a time.
The second round of each level of the competition — the preliminaries, quarterfinals, semifinals and finals — will be a word meaning round, requiring the speller to orally select the correct multiple choice answer to a vocabulary question read by the pronouncer.
This new element of the competition is designed to challenge the spellers and further advance the bee's focus on word knowledge and literacy.
Questions have been prepared by noted linguist and lexicographer Ben Zimmer, language columnist for The Wall Street Journal. The speller will have 30 seconds to view the question and the three answer choices. The speller must answer correctly within the time limit to move on to the next round of competition.
Lara completed the seventh grade at Auburndale Intermediate School in Corona this month.
The bee is limited to students who were in eighth grade or lower on Aug. 31, 2020.
No speller from Riverside County has won the national bee.
