Anaheim : School District Hosts Spanish Spelling Bee

Maria Luisa Hernandez had no idea what pleuroneumonia meant when she spelled it correctly to win the spelling bee sponsored by the Anaheim City School District this week.

And its definition can’t be found in the Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary either.

Pleuroneumonia is Spanish for a lung disease similar to pneumonia. By spelling it correctly, the James M. Guinn Elementary School sixth-grader won the district’s second annual Concurso de Ortografia , or Spanish spelling bee. She received $25 and a plaque, and her name will be engraved on a district plaque.

Sponsored by the Anaheim Elementary Education Assn.--the district’s teachers union--the contest is the only districtwide Spanish spelling bee in Orange County.

“I don’t know what ( pleuroneumonia ) means in English,” Maria Luisa said after she bested nine other sixth-graders in Thursday night’s contest at Loara School. “I don’t even know what it means in Spanish. I just spelled it.”

Because Spanish for the most part is a phonetic language with most words spelled just as they are pronounced, Thursday night’s contest posed a dilemma for its organizers. They said words of five or six letters would be a snap for the contestants, who had each won the bee at his or her school, while longer words might prove too difficult.

But they took their chances and went with the longer words, most of them 10 letters or longer. They gave a list of 237 possible words to the contestants, but they still wound up with a bee that lasted only two rounds.

In the first round, only Maria Luisa and Rachel Bond of Horace Mann spelled their words correctly. Maria Luisa correctly spelled llevabemos , or we take, which had already knocked out six other contestants.

Sylvia Perez of Patrick Henry Elementary School, the last contestant in the first round, and then Rachel missed pleuroneumonia , which Maria Luisa nailed to win the contest. Unlike district English spelling bees, there is no county spelling bee to advance to.