YY Liang spells 'Freon' to take first place in ScholarSkills/Scripps Long Island-Westchester Spelling Bee

YY  Liang correctly spelled “Freon” to win the 2024 ScholarSkills/Scripps Long Island-Westchester Spelling Bee Thursday night.

YY, 12, a seventh-grader from Hartsdale in Westchester County who is home-schooled, won a bee that Brian Vieira, CEO of ScholarSkills, described in a late-night text message as “epic”: 21 rounds of competitive spelling that started at 6 p.m. and did not finish until well after 10. ScholarSkills is a reading skills company that sponsored the competition.

In a change this year, the competition will send its top three finishers to the Scripps National Spelling Bee in late May outside of Washington, D.C.

Zelong Yang, 12, a sixth-grader from Great Neck who attends Great Neck North Middle School, took second place, and Olivia Lipiec, 13, a seventh-grader from Smithtown who attends Accompsett Middle School, took third place.

YY, a nationally ranked junior tennis player, said the competitive mindset needed for that game had not immunized her from stage fright at the bee.

“The first couple of runs were the most unnerving — 'What if I get a word that’s three times harder than anyone else and I get it wrong?'” she said.

That feeling lasted until there were 15, then five children left on the stage, she said, though in the final analysis, “anything bad that happens on a stage is kind of embarrassing.”

Vieira, in YY’s recollection, told competitors that they would be treated “like kings and queens” in the nation’s capital, “which sounds exciting.” She was, however, unsure how she would prepare for the next stage of competition.

“You probably never see 96 percent of the words they give you in a spelling bee … It’s just words from the other side of the world,” she said.

Zelong and Olivia primarily spoke languages other than English as young children — Chinese for him, Polish for her.

For Zelong, who moved to the United States with his family when he was 7, spelling opened doors to a new language and a new place. “Being able to spell words, especially really, really long ones, motivated me to keep learning new words,” he said. “It quickly became that I knew more English than I knew Chinese, and it made communication with my classmates really easy.”

Li Xue, Zelong’s mother, a lawyer, said that “learning how to spell words very well has very particular meaning to us as new immigrants.” The family plans to celebrate Zelong's success with dinner at a local restaurant this weekend. 

Speaking two languages — or three, in the case of Olivia, who is learning French — probably confers an advantage in competitive spelling, she said. “I can tell different patterns in the words” and, by identifying a word’s language of origin, decide the likely spelling, she said.

Good memories and a little luck also helped YY and Olivia. YY learned of the existence of Freon last year when she and her dad bought some to fix his car. Olivia correctly spelled "maillot" — the word for a woman’s one-piece swimsuit, devilishly pronounced my-yo — because she’d seen the word once before, and it reminded her of her dog, Milo.

Thursday night’s bee at Half Hollow Hills High School East pitted top-spelling mostly fifth- through eighth-graders (with one third-grader and one fourth-grader) from 50 schools across Long Island and Westchester against each other.

The spellers joined what Vieira called a “venerable, effective” tradition of learning that goes back to antiquity. The best, he said, go beyond memorizing sequences of letters to analyze the historical roots and linguistic makeup of the words they encounter.

Correction: One third-grader and one fourth-grader participated in the spelling bee. An earlier version of this story did not accurately describe the grade years of the participants.