No one at the 32nd annual Prince William County spelling bee had a stage presence quite like winner Deborah Horton.

A 2009 national contestant, armed with a singular finger-wide braid tucked to her left, she did not just take the usual route of hearing a word, asking questions about it, reciting it, spelling it and reciting it again.

No. She marched to her own drummer last Friday night at Godwin Middle School in Woodbridge.

"Beauteous, what?" asked the home-school representative from Gainesville when the field of contestants narrowed from 20 to two.

"Beauteous," replied school board member Betty Covington, one of three judges.

"Beauteous? Um, what does this word mean?"

She listened, let out a "Hmm," closed her eyes and whispered out loud to herself. Horton then asked about an alternate pronunciations of the word.

"Oh," said Horton before letting out a sigh after hearing there was only one way to say it. She correctly guessed that the word was an adjective, gave it her best shot.

Horton sat down while the judges conferred about her answer. She whispered to herself again as challenger Marie Mach of Graham Park Middle School waited to her right, eventually hearing the response she hoped for: "Correct."

The eighth grader displayed blunt honesty in her approach throughout the roughly 90 minute program, telling the judges that she "never heard of" the word "dilapidated."

As for "locoweed?"

"Whoa," said Horton.

Perhaps the most unique part about her win is that after eight rounds one-on-one with Mach, she answered the final word "ethnocentric" without peppering the panel with questions.

When she heard "correct" sounded back to her one last time, she jumped in the air twice, kicked her shins back and up. Horton could only wipe a single tear from her eye after sitting down and later thanked God for being so "awesome" to her.

While Horton will go on to represent Prince William County at nationals, the western end of the county produced a number of quality participants during the night. Gainesville Middle School's Sang Lee ended up in third place while Skylar Edwards of Bull Run MS and Ishan Lamba of Mountain View MS, who spoke upward in order to reach the microphone, both earned top-10 finishes.

In interviews afterward, Edwards and Lee both mentioned how their parents quizzed them at home on different words.

"My mom sometimes gives me words to memorize," said Lee. "She gives me a set of vocabulary every day and we go over it."

As for how much time he spent reciting words each day, Lee simply replied: "A lot."

Lee mentioned the amount of attention from television cameras and the number of people in the auditorium as challenges for him to overcome on stage. When he spelled his first word right though, he said, "I was like, 'Now I can go on, I don't care.'"

Edwards said he worked on spelling for an "hour and a half each day for the past week." A fan of fiction, Edwards said he reads an entire book each week and particularly enjoys the works of authors Cinda Williams China and Christopher Paolini.

Being on stage at Godwin with cameras pointed in his direction, he said, was "very nerve-racking" considering that at Bull Run, he just sat around a table and answered questions. When asked if he ever heard of the word that caused his exit "pitchblende," which he spelled "p-i-t-c-h-b-l-e-n-d," Edwards shook his head from side to side and said, "No."

Given the "Ohhh" that emanated from the crowd after Covington spelled the word correctly, it seemed most of the adults in the audience did not know it either.