OXON HILL, Md. - Lena Greenberg was in constant motion as she stood waiting for her turn at the microphone at the National Spelling Bee - arms waving, feet dancing, head bobbing.
"It calmed me down," Greenberg said later, although she certainly never looked calm.
Speaking in a loud, high-pitched voice, she spelled "jong" and "thalian" correctly. When the judges nodded their heads, she sprinted and skipped back to her chair and doubled over in delight.
Greenberg, 14, of Philadelphia, was one of 50 spellers to advance to the semifinals of the 85th Scripps National Spelling Bee on Wednesday after 228 participants were eliminated. Last year, she missed the semifinals by one point.
Today's semifinals will not include the youngest speller in bee history, 6-year-old Lori Anne Madison of Lake Ridge, Va., although she made a valiant effort. Lori Anne misspelled one of her two words during the preliminary rounds - "ingluvies," which she started with an "e" - and her score on Tuesday's computer test wasn't enough to make up the difference.
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"It was close," said spelling bee director Paige Kimball.
Only one semifinalist advanced with a perfect score - 10-year-old Vanya Shivashankar of Olathe, Kan. Vanya's sister, Kavya, won the 2009 National Spelling Bee. On Wednesday, the fifth-grader spelled "debellation" and "auteur" with obvious ease, and she got all 25 scored words right on Tuesday's 50-word computer test - including "semelparous" and "outrecuidance."
Like her sister, Vanya aspires to be a surgeon, and she's part of a customarily strong contingent of Indian-Americans in the semifinals. Spellers of Indian descent have won four years in a row and nine of the last 13 years, a run that began when Nupur Lala captured the crown in 1999 and was featured in the documentary "Spellbound."
Last year, five spellers got perfect scores, and semifinalists could afford to miss only two words. This year's test was much more difficult - so 17 out of 25 was enough to advance.
Two of last year's finalists also advanced - Nabeel Rahman of Buffalo, N.Y., and two-time finalist Arvind Mahankali of Bayside Hills, N.Y.
This year's winner gets $30,000 in cash, a trophy, a $2,500 savings bond, a $5,000 scholarship, $2,600 in reference works from the Encyclopaedia Britannica and an online language course.
