The annual Watkins Spelling Contest at Merrimack Middle School on Jan. 19 was preceded with some final practice for seventh- and eighth-grade contenders Tuesday.

Three team winners from seventh-grade teams and three runners-up, four team winners from eighth-grade, and four runners-up were the best of the best in spelling, in a recent school-wide challenge that began with more than 700 students – the entire school population.

Proud participants include seventh-grade team winners Justin Calautti, Alexis Islam and Zach Beavis, backed by runners-up Maddie Kelly, Eireann Kolden and Jon Knauer. Eighth-grade team winners include Bryson Herring, Erica Lane, Autumn Tierney and Kyle Feeney, backed by runners-up Owen Bailey, Kelsey Ferreira, Aaron Thompson and Sydney Roscoe.

Linda Garces, a language arts teacher for seven years at the school, credited the vitality of the spelling bee program to longtime Merrimack businessman and town benefactor Harry Watkins, now deceased, who in 1955 enabled with a sum of $1,000 the establishment of the spelling contest.

The Harry Watkins trust fund continues to pay for prizes. This year, a $50 first prize and others of $40, $30 and $20 will reward the most excellent of the school’s word masters. Three more students will receive a $10 prize.

Discontinued of late are the dictionaries and thesauruses awarded as additional prizes. The cessation was due to the heavy books’ relative abandonment as cyber substitutions such as Google searches and online dictionaries came to the fore. However, an additional prize is in store and top secret at press time, according to Garces.

Garces said that success in the Watkins Spelling Contest may entice school winners to try for the ultimate in modern-day spelling bees – the National Spelling Bee, an event founded in 1925 by a Kentucky newspaper and taken over in 1941 by the Scripps Howard News Service. Last year’s winner, Sukanya Roy, 14, of Pennsylvania, took home more than $40,000 in cash and prizes.

“You can study hard and try to go on to the regional competition, the state finals and the nationals in Washington, D.C.,” Garces said to the students. “Or, you can do the event here at the school on Thursday, just for fun. It’s up to you.”

She gave the group – whose members will compete through 10 rounds of eliminations at the final gathering – some practice words. Each student spelled his or her share correctly, or not. Lists of commonly misspelled words were passed to the students, seated in a semi-circle in room 227.

Highly prized by them, too, was a list of winning words from each year’s National Spelling Bee. The winning word in 1925, the first year of the contest, was gladiolus. In 2011, the winning word, spelled correctly by the 14-year-old winner, was cymotrichous – relating to wavy hair.

Parents, classmates and friends of the participants are invited to attend the Watkins Spelling Contest at Merrimack Middle School at 8 a.m., Thursday, Jan. 19. For more information, call the school at 424-6289.