WASHINGTON — At least it was a tough word that knocked Hawai'i's Andrew Zhou out of the national spelling bee yesterday.

Andrew, 14, misspelled "quatenus," meaning "in the capacity of," in the bee's fourth round. But he didn't seem too shaken by the bell that signaled his bee was over.

"It's a good word to get out on," the eighth-grader at Robert Louis Stevenson Middle School in Honolulu said, eating a brownie as he left a special room where spellers can recover after they've been eliminated. "Actually, I'm kind of relieved to see that it's all over now, so it's like an end to all the, you know, torture."

For months, as he prepared for the bee, Andrew studied words for two to four hours a day. Now that's all over.

The Honolulu Advertiser sponsored Andrew's trip to the 2007 Scripps National Spelling Bee, where he was the only representative of Hawai'i. This year's bee is the 80th annual competition.

Andrew had advanced past nearly two-thirds of the record 286 spellers who entered the competition when he faltered. He passed a written test with 25 words — ranging in difficulty from "icicle" to "bewusstseinslage," a German word meaning a state of consciousness or feeling devoid of sensory components — and correctly spelled "maintenance" and "trellised" in oral rounds, before slipping on "quatenus."

He spelled it "q-u-a-t-a-n-u-s," just missing the correct spelling.

By getting as far as he did, Andrew earned a $175 cash prize, a $100 savings bond, a commemorative spelling bee watch, an unabridged Merriam-Webster dictionary on CD-ROM and other prizes.

The bee continues today on ESPN and ABC.

Spellers range in age from 10 to 15, with girls outnumbering boys 147 to 139. The bulk of the spellers — 67 percent — attend public schools. They come from the United States, Canada, the Bahamas, Jamaica, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, New Zealand and Europe.

Fifty-six of the spellers have competed in the national bee before. One speller, Samir Patel of Texas, is competing for the fifth time.

Last year's champion, Kerry Close of Asbury Park, N.J., went 20 rounds before winning. It was her fifth trip to the bee.