A Culver City eighth-grader advanced Wednesday into the fourth round of the 89th Scripps National Spelling Bee in National Harbor, Maryland, but a Placentia student was eliminated from the competition.
Cooper Komatsu, who attends Culver City Middle School, was one of 45 competitors who advanced into the next stage of the competition in National Harbor, Maryland. After completing a 26-question multiple-choice spelling and vocabulary test on Tuesday, Cooper correctly spelled the words tagasaste — a small evergreen tree — and adventitious — an adjective describing something that occurs by chance.
Samuel Littrell, a student at Kraemer Middle School in Placentia, correctly spelled the words tragopan — an Asian pheasant — and scenographer — a scene painter. But his overall score, including the spelling and vocabulary test, was not high enough to propel him into the next round.
There were 285 competitors at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center, but only 45 will advance to round four of the spelling bee on Thursday.
Cooper qualified for the national bee on March 15 by winning the Los Angeles County Scripps Regional Spelling Bee for the second consecutive year. His final word was gudgeon, a noun meaning any of numerous spiny-finned fish, usually having a broad depressed head and large mouth and occurring chiefly in shallow costal waters.
Cooper reached the semifinals of last year’s national bee. He correctly spelled both of his semifinal words, but did not score high enough on two multiple-choice spelling and vocabulary tests to be among the 10 spellers to qualify for the championship finals
Cooper is 13 years old and teamed with Jem Burch to win the North American School Scrabble championship last month.
Cooper has studied Japanese since he was a kindergartener and likes how it connects him to his ancestors’ culture. He has a passion for geography, maps and discovering new places. Social studies and math are his favorite subjects.
Cooper is a member of his school’s cross country and robotics teams and a Boy Scout. He is a Los Angeles Clippers fan but says he also loves the Los Angeles Lakers. His maternal grandfather, Robert Rosenberg, competed in the 1955 Scripps National Spelling Bee.
Samuel, 14, qualified for the national bee by winning the Orange County Spelling Bee on Feb. 27. His final word was cataclastic, an adjective referring to the process of deformation or metamorphism in which the grains of a rock are fractured and rotated.
Samuel also won the 2014 Orange County bee to qualify for the national bee, where he was eliminated in the third round when he misspelled viaticum, an allowance for traveling expenses.
The bee is intended “to inspire children to improve their spelling, increase their vocabularies and develop correct English usage that will help them all their lives,” according to Paige Kimble, the bee’s executive director and 1981 champion.
The bee is limited to students in eighth grade or below, with contestants ranging in age from 6 to 15 years old.
The original field consisted of students who won locally sponsored bees in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, along with American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands and Department of Defense schools in Europe.
Six foreign nations were also represented — the Bahamas, Canada, Ghana, Jamaica, Japan and South Korea.
The semifinals will be shown on ESPN2 from 7-10 a.m. Thursday and the finals from 5-7 p.m. Thursday on ESPN.
The finals can also be seen on the WatchESPN app.
Throughout the bee, ESPN3 and WatchESPN will have a multiple-choice “Play-Along” version, where viewers will have a one-in-four chance to pick the correct spelling.
Informational boxes highlighting the word’s etymology, definition, pronunciation and part of speech, along with live tweets and the speller’s biography are also part of the “Play-Along” version.
What ESPN has dubbed as the “SpellCheck” feature has been added to the main feed, highlighting each individual letter as the speller spells the word. Correct letters will be highlighted in gold and the first letter the speller gets incorrect will be highlighted in red.
The winner will receive $40,000 from Scripps, which owns television stations, cable networks and newspapers; a $2,500 U.S. savings bond and complete reference library from the dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster; and $400 in reference works from Encyclopaedia Britannica and a three-year membership to Britannica Online Premium.
— City News Service