NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. - Under the glare of television lights Wednesday, Little Rock seventh-grader Chythanya Murali spelled two words correctly in the Scripps National Spelling Bee, but she did not score high enough in the competition’s written test to proceed beyond the preliminary round.
Chythanya, a 13-year-old student at LISA Academy charter school in Little Rock, sat with her mother and father, Vineetha and Elambilan Murali, and her English teacher, Judy Knieling, as the spellers who made it to today’s semifinal round were announced.
As the last of the 41 students, out of the original 280 competitors, made their way to the stage at the front of the suburban Washington hotel ballroom, it became clear that Chythanya had not made the cut.
Vineetha Murali, a research scientist at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, put her arm around her daughter and gave her a big kiss on the check.
Smiling, Chythanya seemed unfazed.
“I need to study harder,” said the expert speller, who also holds a second-degree black belt in karate.
Chythanya, whose trip to Washington was sponsored by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, qualified for the 86th Annual Scripps National Spelling Bee when she won the Arkansas State Spelling Bee in March.
During two oral rounds of competition Wednesday, she was flawless.
She reeled off her first word, “perestroika” without hesitation during the first round.
During the second round, she stood about 15 paces behind the speller who preceded her - Samuel Yeager, a 14-year-old from Chinle, Ariz., who was given the word “yannigan,” which is defined as a member of a scrub team in baseball. When Samuel spelled it incorrectly -“yannagan” - a high pitched bell dinged, signaling his error.
Chythanya looked up for an instant at the ceiling and then strode purposefully to the microphone and waited for the contest’s official pronouncer, Jacques Bailly, to give her a word.
“Senary,” Bailly said, evenly, before explaining that the word means “of, based upon, or characterized by six.”
“May you use the word in a sentence, please,” Chythanya said.
“Jethro experimented with music using a senary scale,” Bailly said.
Her hands clasped in front of her and her hair tied in braids, Chythanya recited the proper spelling in a strong voice.
When Samuel missed his word, Chythanya said she briefly envisioned herself in his place and then erased the thought from her mind and concentrated on Bailly.
“I went up hoping I’d get a word I know,” she said.
“Senary” was one of the thousands of words she and her father had practiced in the weeks leading up to the competition.
“As soon as he said the meaning of the word, I knew I had it,” said Chythanya, who was born in India and moved to the United States when she was 2.
Despite her perfect record in front of the cameras, which were filming the preliminary rounds for ESPN3, Chythanya did not score high enough on a computer test that combined spelling with vocabulary knowledge.
It was the first time in the Bee’s history that spellers were asked in the computer portion to provide definitions of words.
The change threw her off, but her father, an accountant, reminded her that each speller had to deal with the rule change.
“I told her, this is applicable to everyone, not just you,” he said.
As an eighth- grader, Chythanya will still be eligible for the Bee next year.
Knieling, her teacher, predicted Chythanya will be ready.
“She’s very calm under pressure,” she said.
Arkansas, Pages 9 on 05/30/2013