Eleven advance to Scripps National Spelling Bee finals

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Eleven elite wordsmiths in the Scripps National Spelling Bee are ready for primetime Thursday night after jousting earlier through three rounds of semifinals for three-and-a-half pulverizing hours - 30 minutes longer than expected.
Some of the bright youngsters ABC's cameras will capture at 8 p.m. Eastern are used to being in a foxhole together including Kavya Shivashankar of Olathe, Kan., and Sidharth Chand of Bloomfield Hills, Mich.
"Even though we're competitors, we know that the only thing that can defeat us is the dictionary," Shivashankar said.
The two 13-year-old favorites for champion have competed in the national Bee before. After sitting shoulder to shoulder during semifinals, they will face off in the finals.
"We're cheering each other on," Shivashankar said.
She and Chand gave a special salute to Josephine Kao of Roseville, Calif.
"She's a friend, and she's been here the same number of times I've been here," said Shivashankar, who is participating in her fourth national Bee.
When Kao, a 14-year-old eighth-grader, fell victim to "gastaldo" at the beginning of the second round of semifinals, Shivashankar and Chand stood and clapped while Kao walked off stage.
"I thought she deserved a standing ovation," said Shivashankar.
An established friendship wasn't a requirement for staunch support from other competitors taking turns before the microphone.
Alex J. Clifton Wells of San Diego exchanged high fives with flair with other spellers in his section Thursday morning -- even though he doesn't know them well.
But he doesn't have to know them to have a feel for what's going on in their heads.
"The pressure I feel, I think other people feel that, too," said Wells, sporting an impressive mane of blond hair and a neatly controlled blond beard. "Having spelled the word right, I think they would want some kind of reward for that."
After acing his first word in the semifinals with little trouble - "kinetosis," which means motion sickness -- he stumbled on a trickster with Latin-into-French origins: "Dansant," which means an informal or small dance.
His fall was a sign organizers had ratcheted up the difficulty of words in the second round of semifinals.
The first round Thursday for the 41 semifinalists brought only five deadly pings of the bell, but it was soon clear that the big word guns were blazing in the next round. Six of the first seven spellers fell under the onslaught of bruisers such as "barbotte" - a complicated dice game -- and "skeuomorph" - a derivative object with ornamental design cues to the structure of the original.
The pings came steadily after that, emptying the chairs on stage and leaving isolated spellers to wait for their next turn in the three rounds of the semifinals.
While tonight's champ will take home $30,000 in cash and more than $10,000 in prizes, spellers landing second place through eighth place won't do too shabbily either in the cash department.
For instance, the second-place winner will take home $12,500 to comfort him or her in defeat. Third place gets $7,500 to perhaps fortify efforts studying for next year's Bee. The cash prize shrinks with each rank, down to a minimum of $100 for each participant.
Trish Choate can be reached at choatet(at)shns.com.

Finalists
Eleven spellers will compete for the championship at the Scripps National Spelling Bee to be aired at 8 p.m. Eastern on ABC. They are:
Ramya Auroprem of San Jose, Calif.
Serena Skye Laine-Lobsinger of West Palm Beach, Fla.
Kyle M. Mou of Peoria, Ill.
Aishwarya Eshwar Pastapur of Springfield, Ill.
Kennyi Kwaku Aouad of Terre Haute, Ind.
Kavya Shivashankar of Olathe, Kan.
Sidharth Chand of Bloomfield Hills, Mich.
Tussah Heera of Las Vegas, Nev.
Neetu Chandak of Seneca Falls, N.Y.
Anamika Veeramani of North Royalton, Ohio
Tim A. Ruiter of Centreville, Va.

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.scrippsnews.com)