When Utah's Colleen Huber was asked in the National Spelling Bee Wednesday to spell a word pronounced "vah," she knew without a second thought that it is V-O-E-U.

"I had studied it and knew it," she said nonchalantly. She didn't even have to seek help by asking for the word's origin or its definition.Such studying and skill help put Colleen among the 177 of 222 spellers who breezed through the first three rounds of competition during the first day of the bee on Wednesday - even though organizers had supposedly skipped the really easy words for those of moderate difficulty or more.

But that success didn't settle down Colleen - the 14-year-old champion of the Deseret News Utah Spelling Bee - for what was to come on Thursday. "It made me more nervous because I know I'm getting closer" to possibly winning.

The other words that Colleen handled on Wednesday include one pronounced "foam-it-ees." It was spelled F-O-M-I-T-E-S and means an inanimate object contaminated with chemicals.

The other word was pronounced "ah-ten-u-wait" and Colleen correctly spelled it A-T-T-E-N-U-A-T-E, which means to thin or weaken.

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Even though "attenuate," "voeu" and "fomites" are not common words, Colleen considers them easy - and said the words Thursday were expected to be "really tough."

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