Bloomfield Student is North Jersey Spelling Bee Runner-Up

At the end, all Riyad Moughawech could do was laugh it off.

He had spelled his way to a second-place finish Thursday in the North Jersey Spelling Bee at Bergen Community College in Paramus.

But the Bloomfield Middle School student was stumped by the word "wejack," an Algonquin word meaning woodchuck.

"That's a ridiculous word," Moughawech said, cracking up, and causing the audience in the Anna Maria Ciccone Theater to laugh, too. He gave it a shot anyway, but added an extra "e."

Still, his finish was good enough to win an iPod, a $20 Amazon gift card and a subscription to Encyclopedia Britannica. 

Moughawech and another student from Bloomfield, Mary Campos-Poreira, were among the 32 finalists at the Spelling Bee.  Campos-Poreira of Fairview Elementary got to Round 7 but was eliminated with the word "dolcissimo."  A student from Haverstraw Middle School, Sanjana Mohan Malla, won the competition, spelling "tromometer," an instrument used for measuring or detecting minute earth tremors, according to Merriam-Webster.

She received a laptop, a $1,000 scholarship and advanced to the Scripps National Spelling Bee in Washington, D.C.

The competition was the 75th annual North Jersey Spelling Bee. To celebrate, Mauro Castano of Cake Boss fame wheeled in a cake decorated with all the winning words from each year and topped with a bumblebee.

"The cake was amazing," Moughawech said.

A camera crew was on hand to film the bee as part of a Cake Boss episode.

The very first winner of the North Jersey Spelling Bee, Margaret Karle Schak, was also on hand. Schak met President Franklin Delano Roosevelt after winning the spelling bee in 1935, and went on to become the first woman mayor of Rutherford.

"This original spelling be experience gave me confidence in my life," she told the students.