A 13-year-old from Corona advanced to the fifth round of the 2022 Scripps National Spelling Bee Wednesday, correctly spelling profonde, a special pocket in the tail of a magician’s coat.
Lara Randhawa will next have to answer a word meaning question. The second round of each level of the competition — the preliminaries, quarterfinals, semifinals and finals — is a word meaning round, requiring the speller to orally select the correct multiple-choice answer to a vocabulary question read by the pronouncer.
The word meaning questions were added to the bee in 2021 in an attempt to challenge the spellers and further advance the bee’s focus on word knowledge and literacy.
Lara was eliminated from the 2021 bee when she gave an incorrect answer to the word meaning question in the quarterfinals, “What does a trousseau consist of?” The correct choice was clothes and other belongings of a bride.
“I knew how to spell the word trousseau but did not know the meaning and unfortunately picked the wrong choice,” Lara told City News Service in a 2021 email interview. “Luck is a known part of the bee and I plan on working to improve my vocabulary.”
Lara finished in a 16-way tie for 43rd in the 2021 bee.
The eighth grader at Auburndale Intermediate School in Corona advanced to the 2022 quarterfinals by correctly spelling two words and correctly answering a multiple-choice word meaning question Tuesday. She began the competition at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center in National Harbor, Maryland, by correctly spelling realgar, a soft orange-red arsenic ore, used in pyrotechnics and tanning and as a pigment.
In the second round, she correctly answered the multiple-choice word meaning question, “What is a catalyst?” selecting, “something that starts a process or change.” Lara correctly spelled proteiform, an adjective meaning changeable in form, in the third round.
Lara was among the 88 spellers from the original field of 234 competing in the quarterfinals.
The quarterfinals, semifinals and finals will be streamed live on the free platforms on the ION Plus and Bounce XL channels, which are available via free apps on Smart TVs (Samsung TV+ and Vizio Watchfree+) and other free apps (Roku Channel and Pluto TV) that can be accessed through Smart TVs and connected TV devices like Roku, Amazon Fire TV and Apple TV.
The semifinals are set to begin at approximately 1 p.m. Wednesday and the finals at 5 p.m. Thursday.
This is Lara’s final national bee because it is limited to students in eighth grade or below.
Lara qualified for the 2022 national bee by winning the Riverside County Spelling Bee for the second consecutive year. She correctly spelled cumulocirrus, the name of a cloud.
Lara’s sister, Aisha Randhawa, won the county bees in 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019 and tied for 15th in the 2019 national bee.
There were two other Riverside County spellers in the national bee Tuesday. They misspelled their first word and were eliminated.
Faith Zapata, a sixth-grader at Palm View Elementary School in Coachella, misspelled appurtenances, equipment used for a specific task or purpose. She spelled it aperdances.
John Folsom, a seventh-grader from Van Avery Preparatory School in Temecula, misspelled gambol, a verb meaning to leap about playfully. He spelled it gambul.
No speller from Riverside County has won the national bee.