Davie 7th-grader makes it through Round 14 of Spelling Bee finals. One letter did her in.
With only a few hours between Thursday’s morning competition and the prime-time ESPN broadcast of the Scripps National Spelling Bee Finals, Simone Kaplan got in some last-minute studying of spelling lists.
The seventh-grader from St. Bonaventure Catholic School in Davie also took the time to change into her final bee-inspired outfit. This one was a silky gray dress with yellow-and-black bees, accompanied by gray flats, one adorned with a crown, the other with her signature bee.
The 13-year-old soared through the first six rounds of the Finals, which aired lived Thursday, starting at 8:30 p.m..
The seventh round did her in.
Her word: tettigoniid.
She missed one letter, spelling it tettogoniid.
She walked off the stage and was embraced in a big bear hug by her mother, father and younger sister Maya.
“Hearing the bell wasn’t as shocking as I thought it would be because I was so proud of how far I’d come,” Simone said Thursday night. “Being on that stage made me realize that I do have a higher level of achievement in spelling than I originally thought I did, and so I believe that most likely I’m coming again — unless my mom has anything to say about it.
“Thank you everybody for supporting me along my journey. I hope I haven’t let you down.”
More than three hours later and with none of the competitors misspelling any words for several rounds, Bee officials named the remaining eight co-champions.
Simone’s first word in the Finals was Stakhanovite, a Soviet industrial worker awarded recognition and special privileges for output beyond production norms. After the first round, no spellers were eliminated. Then came the word autotopagnosia, loss of the power to recognize or orient a bodily part due to a brain lesion.
As she walked away from the microphone after spelling the word correctly, the announcer quipped, “She’s got swagger.”
For her third word, Simone barely hesitated with the word athyreosis, an abnormal condition caused by a dysfunctional thyroid gland.
This time the announcer commented on her quick answer: “If she knows a word, she doesn’t mess around with it.”
Her style and smarts carried her through five grueling rounds earlier in the day. She was one of 50 spellers contending for the 16 spots in the Finals. The week began with 562 competitors, culled from last fall, when more than 11 million students worldwide in eighth grade or under began their quest to be named Scripps National Spelling Bee champion.
This was Simone’s third trip to the Scripps Bee, each time winning the Miami Herald Broward Spelling Bee. Last year, she made it to the finals and tied for 10th place, missing the word carmagnole, a dance and song popular during the French Revolution. The previous year, she tied for 189th place.
Next year will be the last year she can qualify for the competition as she will be an eighth grader, the cutoff.
Simone appeared confident on Thursday morning when she took the stage sporting a cold-shouldered top speckled with small bumblebees. She wore apple red jeggings to match her shoes, which were embroidered with red cherries with bees.
She barely hesitated when she was given her words: fissiped, having the toes separated to the base, and marae, a Polynesian temple enclosure used for worship or sacrifice.
Simone got nearly a perfect score in the preliminary rounds held earlier in the week. She missed only one question in the preliminary tests, which include spelling, vocabulary and oral rounds. She was one of only three of the 50 finalists who missed just one question. No one got a perfect score.
Simone’s mother Alana, who wore matching shoes and a jean jacket adorned by an ornate bumblebee on one shoulder, cheered her daughter, Speller Number 65, from the audience during the day.
Under bright lights and dozens of TV cameras trained on her, Simone blazed through several multisyllabic tongue twisters. She often took less than 15 seconds to spit out words like cheiloplasty, plastic surgery to repair lip defects. Her average spell time was 28 seconds, according to the spelling bee.
After Simone successfully spelled varsovienne, a type of dance, in the seventh round, her mother let out a sigh of relief and her father did an enthusiastic fist bump. And her classmates cheered her on, appearing on a livestream feed from the Davie school.
“I believe that she will win,” her classmates chanted. Simone smiled calmly, looked into a nearby TV camera and made a heart with her hands.
Simone’s Winning Words
Here are the words Simone Kaplan spelled correctly during the 92nd Scripps National Spelling Bee. Round 1 was a preliminaries test, which included spelling and vocabulary words.
Round 2: Stichos
Round 3: Careen
Round 4: Fissiped
Round 5: Cheiloplasty
Round 6: Xystus
Round 7: Varsovienne
Round 8: Marae
Round 9: Stakhanovite
Round 10: Autotopagnosia
Round 11: Athyreosis
Round 12: Leister
Round 13: Huanglongbing
Round 14: Manualiter
Round 15: Simone misspelled tettigoniid. She spelled it tettogoniid.
Source: Scripps National Spelling Bee
This story was originally published May 30, 2019 at 11:48 PM.
