Naomi Li orally spelled two words correctly but did not finish in the top 50 on the written test
Naomi Li competes in the 2012 Scripps National Spelling Bee in the Washington, D.C., area.Naomi Li did not advance to the semifinal round of the Scripps National Spelling Bee.
She needed 23 points on the written portion of the competition to advance.
She got 22 points, her mother Honjie Li said.
"It's hard," Honjie Li said. "She worked really hard."
The Southern Lehigh Middle School eighth-grader made the trip to the Washington, D.C., bee for a second year in a row as a two-time winner of the regional bee sponsored by The Express-Times and lehighvalleylive.com.
She spelled eremic and galjoen correctly in the oral portion of the competition.
Only the top 50 of the 278 qualifying spellers make it to the semifinal round.
In the regional competition, Naomi defeated more than 60 other contestants from Northampton and Lehigh counties in Pennsylvania and Warren and Hunterdon counties in New Jersey.
The National Spelling Bee began in 1925, according to its website. Nine newspapers came together to start the bee, which Scripps took over in 1941.
The semifinals will be broadcast at 10 a.m. Thursday on ESPN2. The finals will be on ESPN at 8 p.m.