BATON ROUGE - Days after finishing sixth grade at Glasgow Middle School, 12-year-old Naqeeb Mohammad Hossain competed in the Scripps National Spelling Bee. 

Hossain spelled his way through his school, the district and the region to be competing with 242 kids from across the U.S. The competition, which runs from Tuesday through Thursday, is being held in National Harbor, Md.

Hossain correctly spelled the word "gaffe" in the first round but was eliminated in the second on a definition question for the word "Ebullience." He said that it meant defiance, when the competition had the listed definition as exuberance.