"Sthene" is the word.

Chances are you've never heard

of it until now and will never use it. It's a unit of measurement, just

in case you care. (We'll tell you about it later in this article.)

But for Heather Buzzard of

Fayetteville, it's the distance between home and Washington, D.C., where

she will compete in May in the National Spelling Bee. The 13-year-old

spelled "sthene" correctly last week to clinch the state spelling

championship.

She's never used the word,

either. "I just knew it because it's on the list," she said

Monday, referring to the 4,000 or so words that are distributed to spelling

bee competitors every year in grades 4-8.

An eighth-grader, Heather has

been homeschooled her entire life. Georgia officials said last week that

she is the first homeschooler to win the state competition, although a

couple of similar students from other state have won the national title

in the past five years.

As with traditional students,

her first round of competition was at the local level. The Peachtree City-based

homeschool group in which she participates conducted its own spelling

bee to select a representative at the district competition, which included

expert spellers from seven counties. The top two in each district earn

a spot in the state spelling bee.

This was Heather's second trip

to state and her third straight win among her homeschool group, which

is comprised of some 150 families. Many of them meet once a week for group

activities in certain subjects.

Heather's mother, Barbara,

is her primary teacher at home, and her father, Anthony, is a writer who

has had considerable influence on her interest in words and language.

Heather has two sisters, one of whom is 30 and another in her late 20s.

Her family moved to Fayette County from Illinois when she was 3.

Getting ready for nationals

will be more of the same with some new wrinkles thrown in. As evidenced

exercise in memorization," as her father put it. Contestants dig

a little bit deeper into the more difficult words in the study guide at

each level of competition.

The local spelling bee uses

a few words in the intermediate category, according to Heather, while

the state competition turns it up a notch. "The standard this year

was very high, much higher than last year," said Anthony.

For nationals, the original

study guide can be thrown out the window. Just about any word in the dictionary

is fair game, Heather said.

A win in Washington would mean

more fame and notoriety, on top of the reception she has gotten in the

past week. Her photo appeared in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution over

the weekend, and she was a guest on "The Bert Show" on radio

station Q-100 Monday morning.

The National Spelling Bee is

scheduled for the final week of May. If the past few years are any indication,

local fans should be able to catch Heather in action on ESPN or ESPN2.

If you miss it, we'll be sure to spell out the results for you.

Oh, and what is a sthene? If

you've majored in physics and specialized in mechanics, you'll recognize

a sthene as a metric measure of force exerted on an object. Specifically,

it is 1,000 newtons. One newton is the force giving a mass of 1 kilogram

an acceleration of 1 meter per second per second. The sthene gives the

same acceleration to a mass of 1 tonne.

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