The Utah representative to the National Spelling Bee here learned a new word late Thursday afternoon.
Daniel Briggs, 13, the Deseret News spelling bee champion from Syracuse, Davis County, learned about an apparatus called an orrery that is used to show the relative position and movement of the planets in a model solar system.During the seventh round of the two-day spelling marathon, Dr. Alex J. Cameron asked Daniel to spell that word. When the seventh-grade student spelled it "aurory," it marked the end of his participation in the national contest.
Daniel tied for 20th place out of the 235 spellers. The tie is the result of a formula used by program officials to take into consideration a speller's assigned turn in the contest.
Geoff Hooper, an eighth-grade student at Shadowland Middle School in Arlington, Tenn., successfully spelled a relatively simple word - kamikaze - to clinch the spelling championship late Thursday and win the $5,000 top prize.
But on the way to the spelling crown, Geoff had to overcome such words as stupefacient, caparison, pharisaical, ankh and trafedian, just to name just a few.
During the 12th round, Yuni Kim, 12, Pottsville, Penn., and David Urban, 13, Amarillo, Texas, were competing with Geoff.
However, Yuni misspelled apotheosize and dropped from the contest. David slipped up on renascent and that left Geoff as the final speller. If he had missed, the word would have gone back to David.
As second-place finisher, David received $4,000, and $2,500 went to Yuni. Other cash awards ranged from $1,000 down to $50, depending on the round in which each was eliminated.
Reflecting on his 20th-place finish, Daniel wished he had received the previous word (viscount) in the round. "I think I could have spelled it," he said.
As it turned out, the speller before Daniel misspelled it as vicount.
Daniel was among the 131 who were invited back to the second day of spelling and successfully spelled his way through six previous rounds.
In the first day of competition, Daniel breezed smoothly through maturescent, eburnated and chronicler.
"I did the best I could and that's what counts. My goal was to go to Washington and that's what I did," Daniel said.
During the second day, Daniel had no trouble with words like providential, cantankerous and omnifarious.
Daniel fared better than six other spellers from the intermountain area of Utah, Idaho, Wyoming and Nevada.
The National Spelling Bee is sponsored by Scripps Howard Newspapers and other newspapers throughout the United States, Guam, Mexico, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
The annual Deseret News spelling bee begins in the fall when the newspaper prepares a list of 500 words for use during the school year. In the early spring, classroom, school and district bees are held.
Each district sends a representative to the statewide spelling bee, and a winner is selected to send to Washington. The program is sponsored locally in cooperation with the State Office of Education, Utah Education Association and State PTA.
Participants include public, private, parochial and home study students.