San Diego eighth grader advances to third round of National Spelling Bee

An eighth grader at Bright Horizon Academy in San Diego advanced to the third round of Scripps National Spelling Bee Tuesday in National Harbor, Maryland.

Duaa Ouznali correctly spelled telegnosis, a noun meaning knowledge of distant happenings obtained by occult or unknown means, in the first round at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center.

In the second round, she was asked a vocabulary question, to define "malfeasance," and she correctly chose an act of wrongdoing.

Duaa then took a written test, the results of which have not been released. The scores from the written test will determine who will advance to Wednesday's quarterfinals.

Under bee rules, spellers will be grouped by their number of correct answers. The number of spellers to advance will be determined by identifying the group whose minimum score results in as close to 100 quarterfinalists as possible.

Duaa qualified for the national bee by winning by the San Diego County Scripps Regional Spelling Bee in March, correctly spelling droshky, a public carriage used in Russia, to end the 27-round competition.

Duaa's participation in the national bee means she will be unable to attend her school's promotion ceremony Wednesday but received "her own high school send off" last week, 10News reported.

The 13-year-old's interests include reading and learning trivia, according to biographical information supplied by bee organizers. She has a fondness for writing short stories and learning about languages. Duaa is a practitioner of the Korean martial art taekwondo and swims.

Duaa's favorite animals are cats and favorite school subject is math.

The bee began with a field of 243 spellers from all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Department of Defense schools and five nations outside the United States -- the Bahamas, Canada, Ghana, Kuwait and Nigeria.

There were 42 spellers eliminated in the first round and 18 in the second, reducing the field to 165.

The bee is limited to students in eighth grade or below and who were born on Sept. 1, 2009 or later.

The bee will conclude Thursday. The winner will receive $50,000 from the Scripps National Spelling Bee, $2,500 and a reference library from the dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster, $400 in reference works from Encyclopedia Britannica including a 1768 Encyclopedia Britannica replica set and a three- year membership to Britannica Online Premium.

This is the 100th anniversary of the first national spelling bee which was on June 17, 1925, when the Louisville Courier-Journal invited other newspapers around the country to hold spelling bees and send their champions to Washington, D.C.

This is the 97th edition of the bee. There were no bees in 1943, 1944 and 1945 because of World War II and in 2020 because of the coronavirus pandemic.

San Diego County has produced two national spelling bee champions — Anurag Kashyap in 2005 and Snigdha Nandipati in 2012.