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Shrey Parikh felt the pressure of arriving at the Scripps National Spelling Bee as a favourite, but his confidence showed every time he got a word he knew. And when the bee came down to a lightning-round tiebreaker against Ishaan Gupta, Shrey left no doubt.
The 14-year-old turned a tense, high-quality final into a blowout Thursday night, racing through the 90-second “spell-off” and getting 32 words right to be crowned the best young speller in the English language. Gupta spelled 25 words correctly in the tiebreaker.
An eighth-grade student from Rancho Cucamonga, Calif., Parikh finished third in 2024 but lost his school bee last year when he was battling a fever.
He has dominated the bee circuit since, winning several highly competitive online competitions against many of the same kids he outlasted this week in the nation’s capital.
Gupta, a 12-year-old seventh-grader from Jersey City, N.J., was a semifinalist this year. He outperformed some veteran spellers in the finals and has another year of eligibility left.
Road to finals
Spellers qualify by advancing through regional bees hosted by sponsors around the U.S.
Competitors must get through two preliminary rounds, where they are quizzed on words from a list provided in advance. There is one spelling round and one multiple-choice vocabulary round.
Those who make it through the preliminaries sit for a written spelling and vocabulary test, with the top 100 or so finishers advancing to the quarterfinals. The words for the test, and for all subsequent rounds, are taken from the Merriam-Webster Unabridged dictionary.
Throughout the quarterfinals and semifinals, spellers are eliminated at the microphone through oral spelling or vocabulary questions.
About a dozen spellers typically make it to the finals, although this year only nine made it.
Spellers from 6 countries, including Canada
This year’s bee had 247 spellers representing all 50 states, the District of Columbia, three U.S. territories and five other countries: The Bahamas, Canada, Ghana, Nigeria and the United Arab Emirates. After the preliminary rounds, 167 were left, and that field was cut to 95 quarterfinalists after the written spelling and vocabulary test.
The top returning finisher from 2025 was Sarv Dharavane of Dunwoody, Ga., who finished third last year as an 11-year-old fifth-grader.
This year he got a perfect score on the written test and was one of the spellers to qualify for Thursday’s finals.
Upon hearing the announcement confirming his victory in the spell-off, Parikh turned and shook his competitor’s hand.
The winner’s coaching team included Sam Evans, who has tutored each of the past three champions, and Sohum Sukhatankar, a co-champion himself in 2019. Parikh competed nonstop against other top spellers, pored through advanced study guides and tried to eliminate the variables that had led to the few unexpected exits of his long spelling career.
Former spellers, coaches and other observers described this year’s group of finalists as unusually strong, and said they showed off their skills early by going 18 for 18 to start, breezing through the first spelling and vocabulary rounds. Aiden Meng of Orinda, Calif., ended that streak when he was tripped up by “catometope” to start the second spelling round.
Then the crowd gasped when the bell rung on two thought to be capable of winning it all: Oliver Halkett on “Faesulae” and Zwe Spacetime on “vaesite,” words with tricky combinations of origins and vowel sounds.
Along with his trophy, Parikh will receive $52,500 US in cash, reference works from Encyclopaedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster, a custom trophy and commemorative medal, and $1,000 US in flight credits from Delta Air Lines.
