It is a nerd’s rite of passage, the quintessential moment of childhood terror and triumph in which you don’t have to throw a ball hard or be king of the hill to come out on top.

You just have to spell “antidisestablishmentarianism” right.

And if you do, you might have a chance to go to the biggest spelling bee of them all, the Scripps National Spelling Bee, which this year will be held Thursday and Friday. Margaret Williams of Lehigh Acres and Liam Bressler of Naples will compete, making their first trip to the Washington, D.C., bee.

There’s a lot of competition, only one wrong letter puts you out and only one kid can win.

But the bee is not really about winning. What it is about depends on who you ask and, sometimes, what’s on TV when you ask them.

Margaret Williams

Margaret Williams sits on the milky green living room carpet in a way only a teenage girl can — legs splayed akimbo and arms gathered protectively on the floor in front of her. She is pale in all black and her center-parted hair is lank after her day of laying in the dark with a migraine.

It’s been a bad year for her that way. A three-week absence from school with influenza. Then bronchitis. And then injuries she accrued on the swim team. When she was still swimming. Migraines, too, take her out a day here and there.

“It starts with I, doesn’t it?” Margaret asks her mother, Marsha. She’s talking about the pharmaceutical godsend that now cuts short these headaches. Her brother Sam, 16, had them, too.

“She’s been sick a lot this year. She was sick right before the bee,” says Bill Gerstner of the Lee County bee in late March. A language arts teacher in the Lehigh Acres Middle School’s gifted program, Gerstner has worked with Margaret for two years. “We were almost going to replace her. But she came in the day or two before and said, ‘I’m going to be there.’ We had an alternate there, though, just in case.”

“When she sets her mind to do something,” her mother says, “she’ll do it.”

So, Margaret, 13, won her first major spelling bee correctly spelling five words, winning with the relatively mundane “cadences.” She doesn’t remember all the words now, although her mother can plumb a thick file of bee paraphernalia of five newspaper stories that list and define them.

“You know, Mr. Gershner said ...” her mother says.

“Gers-T-ner, Mom,” Margaret interjects. “With a T.”

“Oh, I guess I don’t ever pronounce the T,” her mother says softly, tolerant of one of Margaret’s many little stabs at individuation. A 53-year-old librarian, Marsha Williams chose a workaday life raising two children over the wall-to-wall hours her law degree would have offered. She starts again: “Mr. (ital)Gerst(end ital)ner says he wakes up in the middle of the night dreaming that she won the bee.”

Her mother laughs. Margaret offers a tiny smile.

If you ask, Margaret will tell you it wasn’t preparation that delivered the win that will take her to Washington, although she studied late into the night that month before the Lee County competition. It wasn’t full-out smarts either, she says, although the eighth-grader skipped a grade years ago, still ending up in the gifted program full-time. She’ll also enter the competitive International Baccalaureate program when she goes to high school next year.

She still bet a friend she wouldn’t win.

“It’s more of being very, very lucky,” says Margaret, her homemade bracelet of two old keys sliding down her arm (“I thought it would be (ital)very (end ital) cool.”) “I was just extremely lucky with the way my brain decided to spell it.”

This is how Margaret talks — in carefully placed italics and with a sometimes peculiar combination of words and ideas.

“Mr. Sunkist Turtle,” she says, savoring the words, “is my so-called attack turtle and my so-called muse. He is the embodiment of my inspiration and keeps me from showing (ital) anyone at all (end ital) a short story with a ...”

She continues, a blur of disconnected details punctuated by an embarrassed laugh.

Liam Bressler

Asphyxiation. That was the word Liam Bressler won with this year, his second time in a Collier County competition.

“You sort of never forget those words,” he says simply.

Liam sits next to his dad, Kyle Bressler, 43, on a leather sectional in their North Naples home. He has short blonde hair, glasses and the long, thin body of a Sugar Daddy. That’s what growing three inches since November will do to you.

Like most 13-year-old boys stranded in mixed company, Liam doesn’t talk much — sometimes tuning into the conversation and sometimes contemplating other matters. Basketball probably.

Siblings Max, 11, and Kara, 9, lounge in low-to-the-ground rocking chairs that look like bucket seats, good-naturedly watching their brother put on the spot.

Liam is a natural speller, says his dad. Special. “We knew he was an unusual kid at 2 years old.” Liam listens, a studiously blank look on his face. “We’d watch ‘Wheel of Fortune,’ and all of the sudden I heard Liam’s voice. He’d solve the puzzle. I thought it was a trick, but it kept happening.”

In preparation for the Collier County bee, Liam studied, though, 30-minutes-a-day in direct competition with homework and basketball and for a while, his preparation for a regional math competition called MathCounts, in which he’s been No. 1 in the region for the past two years. He was also first among Florida sixth graders last year in the Florida Math League’s competition.

Perhaps most impressively, Liam scored in the top 1 percent of seventh-graders who took the SATs this year. That’s in the nation.

“You know, Liam doesn’t really surprise me when he does something really awesome with his schoolwork,” says Deborah Lefebvre, his honors English teacher at the Community School. “He’s someone who works really hard at something when he wants it.”

She describes Liam as a private kid. “He’s a nice guy and a hard worker. I know he’s brilliant in math. He’s a good kid.”

Liam has nothing much to say when you ask him about winning.

“We’re satisfied if he learned 500 new words from this,” his dad says.

“And the roots, the prefixes and the suffixes,” adds his mom, Charlotte, a 44-year-old physical therapist. She’s standing behind one part of the sectional now.

“For us,” his dad goes on, “only one person is going to win the national spelling bee. That means 274 go home disappointed. But if you make the journey fun ...”

The point of it all

“Ask 10 different kids and you’re going to get 10 different responses,” says Paige Kimble, who won the Scripps National Spelling Bee in 1981 with “sarcophagus.” Now she’s the director of the organization. “It depends on what they want from this and what they’re talents are. ... For some children, it’s about challenging themselves.”

Granted, some competitors live for the bee. The 2002 Oscar-nominated documentary “Spellbound” followed a few of them on their way to the 1999 finals. And ABC has taken advantage of the growing interest — from the recent film “Akeelah and the Bee” to the “Spellbound” to Tony-winner “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee” — to co-opt the contest from ESPN, which had televised it since 1994, for prime-time viewing.

Hiring spelling tutors, learning thousands of words a day, taking extra lessons in French, German and other languages to prepare for the onslaught of words you can’t possibly have studied is, well, extreme and not all that common, Kimble says.

Wendy Guey of West Palm Beach was one of only two Florida winners in the bee’s 79-year history. Guey worked at it: Her parents quizzed her daily, she studied hundreds of word lists, including some of past Scripps contests, and kept running lists of unfamiliar words for study. But making it to the national bee was grounded in a more profound motivation.

“I participated in my first class bee in the third grade,” she writes in an e-mail. She’s 22 now, done with college and working with hedge funds in New York City. She won with “vivisepulture” in 1996.

“I misspelled the word ‘regardless’ (I spelled it ‘reguardless’), and was so embarrassed, I vowed to study for the next year’s bee.”

“The bee,” she goes on, “ left an indelible mark on my life. At an early age I was able to develop an appreciation for the English language, and met some terrific people who shared that passion. I learned important life lessons like grace under pressure and that winning isn’t everything.

“Day to day, I can’t go a month without a friend or co-worker asking me how to spell something.”

Liam Bressler

“Dactyllian.”

Liam shoots. He misses.

“D-A-C-T-Y-L-L-I-A-N.”

“Correct.”

Kyle Bressler runs down the list for another word. He almost hums.

“Amorino. A winged infantile figure.”

Liam shoots and retrieves the ball. He shoots and retrieves the ball. He shoots and retrieves the ball.

“Did you hear that one?”

Liam did. He spells it. He’s right.

“Correct.” Not surprise, but appreciation.

It’s cool on this weekday evening so Team Bressler is working in the driveway. Liam shoots baskets (his coach asks for 50 a day) as his dad sits in a lawn chair and tosses him words. They seem to be the only life at this intersection of their gated community: The yards, sidewalks and driveways are still.

His father waves the list in the air. It’s a copy of the 2006 Paideia, which is provided by the bee and groups 4,100 eligible words into 26 themed categories. The pair don’t really use the big dictionary given to all the D.C.-bound spellers. At something north of five inches thick and containing 476,000 words, it’s too ungainly and, frankly, overwhelming. Of course, any of those words are viable choices for the bee.

“We have a number of these,” he says of the 33-page paideia, this one with check marks for each time he’s gotten a word right. “The dog ran away with one.”

“Duvet.” With a hard T at the end. “There are a lot of French words. Liam says that if he could rewind his life he’d go back and take French.”

“D-U-V-E-T,” Liam spells.

“Correct.”

Do you remember most of the words, Liam, or do you just guess?

“Some words stick out in my mind,” he says as he takes a shot. “The word spelling or definition.”

In competition, some kids will spell out words with their feet before committing themselves out loud, as a character does in Broadway’s “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.” Some hitch-and-start through the building blocks of language — the prefixes, suffixes and roots. Others, Kyle says, will spell their word with their fingers on the placard that hangs around their neck.

“Max and I always talk about that,” Liam says. Brother Max, who has his own ball, stops dribbling to listen. “I just don’t know how that would help you.”

“Everyone has their own thing,” Kyle says.

“Yeah. I don’t think that many play basketball.” Liam laughs.

Kyle moves on to another French word.

“Chev ... Uh. Chev-ro-tan? Chevrotain. It’s a small deer.” He shakes his head as Liam considers his options. These spelling drills are humbling, even to Kyle Bressler, an ear, nose and throat doctor. Like “sombra,” he says. Who would have thought there’d be a word for the shady side of a bullring?

Unfamiliar words — which are common here if rarely anywhere else in life — can sometimes be found in their handheld electronic dictionaries, which can pronounce words in a Stephen Hawking monotone. Some of the lists include pronunciation and definitions, which is a boon, because many of the words in the paideia can’t be found in a standard dictionary.

Liam misses “chevrotain.”

If he misspells a word, they write it down on a separate card. After a few days, they return to it. He has to spell it correctly two more times before they move on to other words.

Twilight settles in and the bugs come out. The team moves inside.

Liam studies about two hours a day now — plus whatever word study he can fit in during the drives to and from school. He doesn’t use the computer for spelling bee prep, his parents say, because of all the inherent distractions. He always works in the living room of the big house, even if he’s studying on his own.

“Tivoli. You know, like the Tivoli Gardens.” They’re in the sporting section of the paideia. They jump around quite a bit, which is good, Liam says, “because I can’t do the same thing for two hours at a time.”

Liam is sitting in one of the rocking bucket seats, all elbows and knees.

“Where is the Tivoli Gardens?” Liam asks his dad.

Team Bressler works just like bee organizer plan: Discussing words, batting around what they sound like they mean, joking about the derivations, making it a part of life.

By a little after 8 p.m., Liam begins losing focus. He plays with Blue Belle, their amiable chihuahua, as words continue to come. The big screen TV is on now, muted. Someone flicks from one basketball game to another.

“There are no good games on tonight,” Liam says.

The games are his reward, his parents say. It’s a refuge from demands of a lot of things probably, including one more word.

“Last word of the evening, let’s find you a really hard one. Coccolithophore.”

After Liam spells it correctly, he moves to the kitchen. He starts eating loudly at the table there as his dad continues to talk about spelling.

Liam is always hungry.

Margaret Williams

A Sunday afternoon half gone, Margaret folds her legs underneath her at the computer hutch in her mother’s bedroom. An orange tabby, who is currently called Caramel, lounges among the piles of folded clothes on the bed. Her mother is cleaning today.

On the monitor, word Web sites fly by. Click, click: She lands on one called Luciferous Logolepsy (“dragging the obscure words into the light of day,” it says). Click, click: Free Dictionary. Click, click: International House of Logorrhea (“which means an obsession with words,” she explains). Click, click: YouTube.com and Linkin Park’s angst-ridden ballad “Numb.”

“I’m becoming,” the blonded lead sings, “all I want to do is be more like they and be less like you.”

This ricochet from site to site, song to song is a formula of Margaret’s divining, and one that she recycles hours and hours on the weekend, and maybe 30 minutes-a-day during the week. More if she’s sick.

She leans back in the chair. Her left thumbnail is sapphire blue today.

“You know, on Thursday the word of the day was ‘margaritaceous,’” she says. Then she deconstructs it in a rush: Spellers seem to like to careen headlong through words they know. “It means pearly. My name is Margaret, which is Latin for pearl.”

It may be a sign. Of what isn’t clear, because she’s going to lose, she says. “They’re going to slaughter to me. I’m almost sure of it.”

Margaret is an introverted girl, says Gerstner, her language arts teacher at Lehigh Acres Middle School. “Very creative, but not usually a very outgoing person. But, lately, she has been more outgoing. The success that she achieved in the bee has helped.”

“Ophidian,” Margaret says.

What does that mean?

Her eyes slide to the left as she tries to dredge up the definition. “Snakelike, I think.” (She’s right.)

She shakes her head when you ask if she has been teased for being smart. Not a lot, she says. She seems to take a certain pride in being considered “weird.”

“The thing about surviving middle school,” she says, “is if someone calls you something, you can’t say ‘na-ah,’ like you did in elementary school. Like, they say you’re a nerd, you say, ‘uh-huh.’ Like you like it.”

“They tend to leave you alone after that.”

Margaret wanders the few steps from the bedroom to the living room to watch some of “Spellbound,” which her mother brought home from the library. Neither have seen it before.

The room is neat and mostly smells of the vanilla candle that burns in the connected dining room. “It’s not House Beautiful,” her mom says several times.

Margaret collapses across a couch pillow on the floor about three feet from the television. Her mother takes a break from scrubbing the bathroom and settles onto the recliner. It squeaks as she breathes.

“It’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience,” says one of the kids in “Spellbound.” (That year Nupur Lala of Tampa won with “logorrhea.”)

So, what’s the bee about, Margaret?

She makes a noise that is mostly “I don’t know” but partly “I don’t care.”

Quiet.

“I think it helps teach them self-discipline,” her mom offers. “And how to handle pressure.”

The documentary drones on.

Do you think about what it would be like if you won?

Same noise, quiet now.

“If I win, I win,” she says. “If I don’t ... I don’t know. It would be nice. but I’m not counting on it.”

By the numbers

275: Number of competitors in this year’s Scripps National Spelling Bee

14: Number of Florida contestants this year

139 and 136: Number of boys and girls, respectively

96: Number of 13-year-olds, the largest age group represented. The smallest age group — 9-year-olds — has just one speller.

3: Number of charter schools kids represented. The largest number of children (196) attend public schools. Home-schoolers (37) outnumber private school entrants (26)

31: Number of spellers without brothers or sisters

27: Number of spellers who have at least one relative who has competed in previous national finals

2: Number of competitors who have been to the national bee five times

Winning words by decade

1925: gladiolus; Frank Neuhauser; Louisville, Ky.

1935: intelligible; Clara Mohler; Akron, Ohio

1945: There was no bee held during World War II.

1955: crustaceology; Sandra Sloss; St. Louis

1965: eczema; Michael Kerpan Jr.; Tulsa, Okla.

1975: incisor; Hugh Tosteson; San Juan, Puerto Rico

1985: milieu; Balu Natarajan; Chicago

1995: xanthosis; Justin Tyler Carroll; Memphis, Tenn.

2005: appoggiatura; Anurag Kashyap; San Diego

How the bee works?

Sponsoring daily or weekly newspapers organize a bee program in their communities, usually with the cooperation of school officials (including home school, parochial and charter schools). The winner of the local bee advances to the to the national competition.

The Scripps National Spelling Bee begins with a 50-minute written spelling test. After that, all 275 competitors spell one word orally. At this stage, incorrectly spelling words only subtract from a possible perfect score of 28. About 90 of the top scorers go on to the third round, where they face cameras, reporters and the bell that announces to everyone, including a prime-time television audience, that you’re out when a word has been spelled incorrectly.

On TV

“2006 Scripps National Spelling Bee”

Championship rounds from Washington, D.C., broadcast beginning at 8 p.m. Thursday on WZVN-Channel 7.

On the Web

Scripps National Spelling Bee: www.spellingbee.com