OXNARD : 8th-Grader Loses in Spelling Bee Finals

Eric Huang, Ventura County’s 14-year-old entrant in the 65th National Spelling Bee, was eliminated from the competition Thursday after stumbling over the word linguipotence in the sixth round.

Eric, an eighth-grader at Fremont Intermediate School, was making his second appearance in the national finals in Washington.

“It’s been a pretty long two days,” Eric said during a telephone interview from his hotel on Washington’s Capitol Hill, “but I’m pretty relaxed right now.”

The sixth round has become something of a curse for the Oxnard wordsmith, who misspelled keno in last year’s sixth round. “I guess it is just a coincidence or something. Maybe I get too nervous then,” Eric said.

The contest included 227 spellers from across the country, each of whom waited for hours for their opportunity to spell a word and advance to the next round.

Eric correctly spelled scurrilous, augment, disseminate, nonchalantly and kvetch, a Yiddish word that he admitted had never popped up in his study sessions for the contest.

Disaster struck in the sixth, when Eric said he could not understand the pronunciation of linguipotence-- which means “master of languages”--mistaking it for a word ending in dence.

Eric says he plans to make the most of what remains of his vacation--he returns to Oxnard with parents Thomas and Joyce Huang on June 3--by taking in the Smithsonian Institution and checking in with relatives on the East Coast.

Looking back, Eric said that competing in the national spelling bee was a victory in its own right. “I tried not to worry about the contest too much, and I just figured as long as I did my best, it would be all right.”