RivCo Spelling Bee Contestant Moves To Third Round

EASTVALE, CA — As school winds down for summer, the next round of the National Spelling Bee is in full swing for one Eastvale 6th Grader.

Victoria Li, a Philistine Rondo School of Discovery, has completed two rounds, with a third to go in the afternoon, for the Scripps National Spelling Bee in National Harbor, Maryland, and has a long way to go in the national competition that concludes Thursday.

At the end of round one, 134 spellers will advance to round two; 31 were eliminated.

She will advance from rounds one and two, and will take a written test from 2:15 to 3 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time.

The scores from the written test will determine who will advance to Wednesday's quarterfinals. Under the 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.

The first two rounds were streamed on www.spellingbee.com and BounceXL.

Victoria qualified for the national bee by winning the 47th annual Riverside County Spelling Bee in March, correctly spelling "Tersanctus," a hymn or invocation praising God as the thrice-holy deity, to end the nearly four-hour, 23-round competition.

According to teachers and her family, at 11 years old, Victoria possesses a deep passion for reading, writing, and archery and plays the piano and clarinet. In her free time, she likes to write poems and stories.

Victoria's favorite animal is the koala and favorite school subject is history. She aspires to become a pediatric surgeon to assist children in need of medical care.

The high stress bee competition 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.

The contestants range in age from 8 to 14, with 76 13-year-olds and 72 14-year-olds. The bee is limited to students in eighth grade or below and who were born on Sept. 1, 2009, or later.

On Tuesday, as round one began, Victoria Li was numbered speller 22 in the competition.

She was asked to spell "morion" in the first round, which she answered correctly.

In the second round, she correctly answered a vocabulary question on the word "cadence," which she correctly answered as "vocal rhythm."

Her progress in round three will be added when the contest begins after a lunch break.

The bee will conclude on 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.

No speller from Riverside County has won the bee.