Fairfax Student Competes in Scripps National Spelling Bee

Sign up for the Fairfax City Patch newsletter!

A Fairfax student is among 285 spellers competing for the title of 2015 Scripps National Spelling Bee Champion.

The preliminary rounds began Tuesday at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center in National Harbor, Md., and continue through Wednesday afternoon.

Trisha Balakrishnan, 11, a sixth-grader at Greenbriar West Elementary School in Fairfax, is among the contestants. Her sponsor is the Fairfax County Times of Reston

Her profile on the spelling bee website says: Trisha’s best subject in school is math: She participates in her school’s math club and is consistently in the top five in activities like Mathcounts, Math Olympiad, the Continental Mathematics League and many others. While Rules is Trisha’s favorite book, her role model is author J. K. Rowling for her perservance and her ability to stay true to her dreams. Trisha also enjoys watching movies, swimming and playing the violin and piano. She has a self-professed “strange love” for magnets — maybe she’ll be able to pick one up as a souvenir from the place she’d most like to visit, Australia.

The spellers’ favorite words includeflibbertigibbet,onomatopoeia, schadenfreude, syzygy,tchotchke and triskaidekaphobia.

Semifinalists will be announced late Wednesday afternoon, and broadcast live on ESPN3.

Semifinals competition is set for Thursday morning, with the championship round to be held Thursday evening. ESPN will broadcast the finals lives starting at 8 p.m. ET.

»Photo of Trisha Balakrishnan of Fairfax, courtesy of Mark Bowen/Scripps National Spelling Bee