San Diego 8th Grader Advances To 6th Round Of National Spelling Bee

POWAY, CA — A Twin Peaks Middle School student from Poway advanced Wednesday to the sixth round of the Scripps National Spelling Bee by correctly explaining the word "sectarian."

As the quarterfinals got underway Wednesday morning, Ben Evans correctly spelled torchére, a tall ornamental stand for a candlestick or candelabra. In the fifth round, he successfully defined the word "sectarian" as someone confined to the limits of one group.

Evans was among 148 spellers from the original field of 245, the largest since 2019, to advance to the quarterfinals by correctly spelling two words and answering a vocabulary question during Tuesday's preliminaries.

He was among the 45 spellers advancing to the sixth round, with 14 spellers eliminated.

Benjamin began the bee by correctly spelling Gondwana, the great southern landmass that formed as a result of the division of a much larger supercontinent known as Pangea about 250 million years ago. He also chose the correct answer to the vocabulary question, "What is a symposium?" by selecting, "a conference in which people give speeches."

In the third round, Benjamin correctly spelled lycopene, a carotenoid pigment that is the red coloring matter of the tomato.

There were 54 spellers eliminated in the first round, 15 in the second and 28 in the third.

Wednesday's quarterfinals at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center in National Harbor, Maryland will be streamed until 10 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time on ION Plus, Bounce XL, Grit Xtra, Laff More and spellingbee.com.

The semifinals will be broadcast from 5 to 7 p.m. Wednesday on ION, which is broadcast in the San Diego market on Channel 69.4, a subchannel of KSWB-TV Channel 69. The network is also carried on many streaming platforms.

The bee will conclude Thursday. The winner will receive $50,000 from the Scripps National Spelling Bee, $2,500 and a reference library from the dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster, $400 in reference works from Encyclopedia Britannica and a three-year membership to Britannica Online Premium and a $350 prize package from SugarBee Apple, including a SugarBee Apple gift basket and $250 gift card.

The 14-year-old qualified for the national bee by winning by the San Diego County Scripps Regional Spelling Bee in March, with two-time defending champion Mihir Konkapaka finishing second.

Benjamin correctly spelled epihippus -- an extinct genus of the modern horse family that lived in the Eocene era, 38 million to 46 million years ago -- as the winning word.

Benjamin's hobbies include playing basketball, football and the piano. He enjoys reading books of all kinds and is a fan of Marvel movies. His favorite subject is math because he sees it as a puzzle. His favorite author is Brandon Mull, best known for his children's fantasy series, "Fablehaven."

Benjamin's favorite athletes are Cleveland Cavaliers guard Donovan Mitchell and San Francisco 49ers quarterback Brock Purdy.

The bee is limited to students in eighth grade or below and who were born on Sept. 1, 2008 or later. Contestants for the 96th edition of the national bee range in age from 8 to 15.

San Diego County has produced two national spelling bee champions -- Anurag Kashyap in 2005 and Snigdha Nandipati in 2012.