Washington: Sriram Hathwar, an 8-year-old Indian American boy, has become the youngest speller in the history of the Scripps National Spelling Bee even as he could not go too far in the popular contest.

But nine other of the 30 Indian American participants made it to the semi finals of the 83-year-old competition Thursday by spelling words like "leptocercal", "bizarrerie" and "trochophore"

Indian kids have dominated the event in recent years, winning the championship five times in the last nine years. The last Indian winner was Anurag Kashyap in 2005 correctly spelling "appoggiatura".

The nine Indian kids among 45 Spellers advancing to the Semifinals were:

Easun Arunachalam ( steeve), Arushi Jauhari (leptocercal), Shiva Kangeyan ( ozostomia), Vaibhav Vavilala (luftmensch), Sameer Mishra (quadrat), Kavya Shivashankar (bizarrerie), Akshat Shekhar (monophthalmic), Sidharth Chand (purslane) and Jahnavi Iyer (trochophore).

In all, 288 children in the 8-15 age group from across the US, Canada and eight other countries qualified for the gruelling two-day competition, but only 63 made it to the quarter finals.