Great Neck middle schooler Brian Liu ties for 4th in Scripps National Spelling Bee

Brian Liu, a student at Richard S. Sherman Great Neck North Middle School, tied for fourth place in the Scripps National Spelling Bee on Thursday night. 

Brian, 13, was one of nine spellers from across the country to compete in Thursday night's Scripps National Spelling Bee finals after successfully advancing through 10 rounds of the competition, starting with Tuesday's preliminaries.

Brian successfully spelled words throughout the first six rounds of finals, including “infula,” a religious ribbon of red and white wool worn around the head in ancient Rome, “kinnor,” a Jewish instrument with 10 strings, and “lysigenous,” an adjective meaning “formed by the breaking down of adjoining cells,” according to Merriam-Webster.

The Bengali noun "kyah," an Indian partridge having a strong spur, was the first word Brian spelled incorrectly Thursday evening. Sporting a zip-up blue jacket, he walked off the stage with the same slight smile he had on his face each time he approached the microphone that evening.

"We are soooo proud of him," Shuting Peng, Brian's mother, told Newsday on Thursday evening via text message. "Brian feels disappointed, but definitely proud of himself because he reached such a high level in the competition."

Brian tied for fourth place alongside Harini Murali, 13, of Edison, New Jersey, and Aishwarya Kallakuri, 14, of Charlotte, North Carolina. The three spellers will each receive around $5,800, the divided sum of the cash prizes for fourth, fifth and sixth place finalists. 

Celebrating its centennial year, the competition featured more than 240 spellers from every state and several countries, including the Bahamas, Canada, Ghana, Kuwait and Nigeria, according to The E.W. Scripps Company, which administers the contest. The spelling bee was held in National Harbor, Maryland, just outside of the nation's capital.

Brendan Nelson, principal of the Richard S. Sherman Great Neck North Middle School, said some of Brian's friends and teachers called him Thursday ahead of the final round.

"He's very humble, so it's easy to root for him. ... I think he feels supremely confident in all the best ways," Nelson said. 

Nelson said Brian also competes in high-level math competitions for the school. He described the middle schooler as a "well-rounded" young man who always puts his best effort forward in everything he does and is "cool, calm, collected, confident and humble when he needs to be."

"I think he's going to continue to do North Middle proud," Nelson said. 

This was Brian's second time competing on the national stage. Now in eighth grade, he placed 23rd in the National Spelling Bee two years ago, advancing as far as the semifinals before he was knocked out. Going into this year's competition, Brian said he wanted to do better than he did in 2023.

During the competition, the teen maintained a calm demeanor as he asked the moderators for definitions of words, their origins and to repeat them. He was one of 40 competitors who participated in the semifinals Wednesday.

Brian was one of two Long Island students to compete in the national contest. Olivia Lipiec, 14, of Smithtown, was eliminated in the preliminary round. Last year, she tied for 149th place.