Brains, poise and preparation are not enough to win the Scripps National Spelling Bee.

Even champions say it takes luck.

"You can know the 20 words before your turn and the 20 words after it. But you may not know the word you have to spell," said John Paola, the 1977 national champion as an eighth-grader at St. Bonaventure School in Shaler.

Another national champion, Stephanie Petit, who represented Independence Middle School in Bethel Park as an eighth-grader in 1987, said good fortune cannot be underestimated.

"You can know 99 percent of the words in the dictionary, but if they pull one you don't, game over," she said.

Dr. Paola, a veterinarian in Annapolis, Md., and Ms. Petit, an attorney in San Francisco, still field questions about the event every spring.

Both say the National Spelling Bee is tougher and more intense than when they competed. There is no argument that it is bigger. The 81st annual bee begins this week in Washington, D.C., with 288 spellers.

Melody Sachko, the first of the Pittsburgh area's three national champions in 1956, topped a field of 61 finalists. Dr. Paola had 93 opponents in Washington and Ms. Petit faced 183.

The bee had a growth spurt after ESPN began televising it in 1994. Spelling isn't a sport, but ESPN found inherent drama in the intellectual battle between students, some of them not yet teenagers.

Most contestants are from the United States, but Canada, Ghana, Guam, Jamaica, New Zealand, Puerto Rico, the Bahamas, American Samoa and the U.S. Virgin Islands are sending spellers this year. Even Europe will be represented by a 13-year-old boy from an air base in Germany.

ESPN will air the semifinals live Friday morning and afternoon. Sister station ABC will broadcast the championship round that night.

Western Pennsylvania's representative is regional champion Jeremy Pople, a 12-year-old seventh-grader at Andrew Mellon Middle School in Mt. Lebanon.

His surname is a famous one in intellectual circles. Jeremy's grandfather, the late John Pople, spent much of his career at Carnegie Mellon University and won a Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1998.

Jeremy says he has been studying arcane words about an hour a day. He also has taken his school curriculum and applied it to the competition.

He said his French class has helped him expand his vocabulary. Under the auspices of the Mt. Lebanon School District, he also has been tutored in Latin by high school student Liz Moody. Jeremy says Latin is the root of many of those $5 words thrown at top spellers.

At the Western Pennsylvania championship in March, he spelled "terraqueous" during a round in which all the other contestants missed their words. The first part of terraqueous comes from Latin. An adjective, the word means "consisting of land and water."

The last two words Ms. Petit spelled to win the national championship -- "dyscalculia" and "staphylococci" -- have roots in Latin and Greek.

Dyscalculia means difficulty in learning mathematics. Staphylococci is the plural of staphylococcus, bacteria that contribute to various diseases, including food poisoning.

As a driven 13-year-old, Ms. Petit skipped the sight-seeing tours in Washington to study for the competition. Her mother coached her. The extra work paid off, as she met President Reagan after her victory.

"He actually spent several minutes alone with our family. He was very charming," said Ms. Petit, now 34.

The spelling competition, she said, was a building block for college and beyond. "It taught me discipline -- to have it and to apply it."

She went on to Princeton and the Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley.

Dr. Paola made it to the nationals twice, in seventh and eighth grades. He said he did not give much thought to winning until the field began to shrink before his eyes in his second year.

"As more people miss and the group gets smaller, you start to think it could happen," he said.

In his championship run, he survived two misspellings in the final round, including the small word "veery." A veery is a brown bird of North America.

Dr. Paola got a second chance when his only remaining opponent also faltered on two words. One was "sesquipedalian," perhaps the signature word for the bee. It means "given to the overuse of long words."

He spelled it and then won with "cambist," an expert on currency exchange rates.

Jeremy Pople says he is feeling no pressure as the bee approaches. "I'm OK on the stage. I'm probably relatively comfortable."

Jeremy has received plenty of moral and academic support, but he also has been challenged about whether great spellers belong on ESPN.

One of his uncles, an accomplished golfer, has carped about the prospect of a preteen wordsmith appearing on a sports network. Jeremy will have to survive the preliminaries to make it to ESPN.

He was letter-perfect in 11 rounds at the regional competition. His winning word -- "clavichord" -- had just been covered in a general music class at his school. A clavichord is a keyboard instrument that is smaller and weaker in tone than a piano.

For him, clavichord popped up at exactly the right moment, more proof that luck has something to do with conquering those mind-numbing words.