Luckily, Nikhil Ganta knows a thing or two about being verbose.
The 12-year-old Coloradan correctly defined “verbose” — meaning “wordy” — as part of his Wednesday morning winning streak at the Scripps National Spelling Bee in Washington, D.C., where the sixth-grader was among a waning group of America’s best young spellers to advance to the afternoon semifinal rounds.
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In addition to his apt vocabulary word, Nikhil, who lives in Timnath and attends Fort Collins’ Kinard Core Knowledge Middle School, correctly spelled “obtect,” a type of insect pupa enclosed in a firm case or covering with the appendages held tightly against the body.
And, in the last quarterfinal round, he aced “karyogram,” a diagrammatic representation of an organism’s chromosome complement. Standing before the microphone on the Constitution Hall stage, Nikhil asked for the word’s definition, language of origin and other identifying information while his fingers mimed typing.
The fierce competition narrowed to 54 kids as the quarterfinals wrapped up.
Nikhil advanced to the nearly century-old national contest after winning the 86th annual Denver Post Colorado State Spelling Bee in March.
He is the last Colorado kid standing at the national bee, as Superior’s Derek Li was felled by a written test in round three of Tuesday’s preliminaries.
Semifinals will be held later Wednesday afternoon into the evening. Thursday’s finals will be broadcast live on the ION network from 6 to 8 p.m. Mountain Time.
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Wednesday’s quarterfinals and semifinals consist of oral spelling and vocabulary rounds on a big stage in front of a sprawling audience.
About a dozen spellers will advance to the finals. When only two remain, Scripps has the option to use a lightning-round tiebreaker known as a “spell-off” to determine the champion.
The bee is broadcast and streamed on channels and platforms owned by Scripps, a Cincinnati-based media company.
Wednesday’s semifinals will stream on Scripps Sports Network and spellingbee.com from 12:30 to 4:30 p.m. Mountain Time. Tape-delayed semifinals will be broadcast on ION from 6 to 8 p.m. Mountain Time on Wednesday.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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