For the first time ever, a Long Beach Unified School District (LBUSD) student has won the Los Angeles County Scripps Regional Spelling Bee.
During the countywide competition held at Walter Reed Middle School in North Hollywood March 4, Stanford Middle School seventh-grader Dina Miranda bested 150 spellers with the championship word grivoiserie—a noun with French roots that means an act of impropriety.
The event started out with 34,109 students from over 300 public, private, magnet and religious schools in the county, which dropped down to 150 contestants after registration and a vocabulary test. The contest lasted 10 hours, with 26 rounds and 507 words, according to Friends of Reed and PTSA, which hosted the event.
The second place winner was Mihika Chechi, a seventh grader from John Muir Middle School, and the third place winner was Jackson Lund, a sixth grader from Calle Mayor Middle School.
This isn’t Miranda’s first try at the Spelling Bee. In 2016, as a fifth grader at Gant Elementary School, she won second place in the county competition.
Other notable finalist and elimination words this year included chiaroscuro, apishamore, yttrium, Gibraltarians, pfeffernuss, mynheer, zeitgeber and philhellenism.
Miranda will go on to represent LBUSD at the Scripps National Spelling Bee in Washington, D.C. in late May.
South Bay Community News 