National Spelling Bee: East Bay 6th-grader advances

After four rounds at the National Spelling Bee, a Dublin 12-year-old remained in the competition, one of 48 spellers in the semifinals.

Shradha Rachamreddy, a sixth-grader at Quarry Lane School,  correctly spelled escritoire, cabette and cholecystitis and defined artifice.

Vikrant Chintanaboina, 13, a seventh-grader at Discovery Charter School Falcon Campus in San Jose, made it to Round 4 but was eliminated on tyroglyphid, which he spelled tyrogliphid.

Both Bay Area contestants competed in 2019, when they were among a group tied for 51st place.

Eighty-eight of this year’s 234 spellers advanced to Round 4 — the quarterfinals — and almost half were eliminated. Semifinals will be Wednesday night in Oxon Hill, Maryland, and finals Thursday night.

After a recent run of championship ties at the bee — including an eight-way tie in 2019 — a new rule has been instituted under which an official can declare a spell-off. Each speller remaining would have 90 seconds to spell as many words as they could from a predetermined spell-off list, and the one who spelled the most would be declared the winner.