Chesterfield Sixth Grader Advances at National Spelling Bee

Chesterfield's Gokul Venkatachalam is looking to make another deep run at the National Spelling Bee Competition after successfully clearing the first and second on-stage rounds of the competition. 

The 12-year-old Venkatachalam spelled "accommodate" and then "sylph" (a slender woman or girl) to secure his advance, making it to the semi-finals of the national competition for the second year in a row. 

You can track his progress on Twitter by following Chesterfield Patch and ScrippsBee. The contest is also being streamed on ESPN3 with the final to be broadcast live on ESPN Thursday evening. 

Last year, he made it all the way to the semifinals before being eliminated in the sixth round. The word that tripped him up? “Kahikatea,” a type of New Zealand evergreen tree.

KSDK sat down with Gokul ahead of Wednesday's competition and he compared fitting together the different roots and parts of complex, arcane words to finding and combining the pieces of a puzzle. 

The Parkway West Middle School student was one of 281 super spellings from around the country to make it into the final stage of the competition. It includes a new challenge this year -- a vocabulary component.

It's part of the computerized test that proceeds the live preliminary rounds that began today. Scores from the two will be combined to determine who makes it to the finals.