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The winner will take home $30,000 and a scholarship.

The most experienced speller remaining in the National Spelling Bee breezed through most of two semifinal rounds with his usual confidence. But with one word separating him from his first time in the finals, he was flustered.

"Kanaima."

Nicholas Rushlow went through the usual checklist, asking the definition an evil spirit, believed to be an avenger. Next he asked for the country of origin, which was British Guyana. Pronouncer Jacques Bailly used it in two sentences.

"Is there anything else I didn't ask?" Rushlow said.

After getting the word right, he mouthed a word that was easy to spell "Whoa!" then bounded back to his seat and high-fived his few remaining competitors.

Out of 278 participants who gathered at a convention center outside Washington, nine made it to the finals Thursday evening. They nailed words derived from Greek, Latin, French, German, Hawaiian and Afrikaans. They got proper names and obscure medical terms.

Snigdha Nandipati was first up in the finals. The 14-year-old avid reader from San Diego correctly spelled "psammon," which means an ecological community.

Hours earlier, Lena Greenberg, an excitable home-schooled 14-year-old from Philadelphia, became the last to make the finals when she spelled "cholecystitis" an inflammation of the gallbladder. She said she didn't know the word but was able to piece it together. After spelling it right, she ran back to her chair, handed out high fives and buried her face in her hands.

"It means so much," Greenberg said. "I can't believe I got here! It doesn't make sense. There were a lot of the words in the semifinals I didn't know."

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What's that word? National Spelling Bee ready for finals