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The US has crowned a new spelling bee champion. All it took was three days, 18 rounds and a 90-second spell-off that had audiences looking up words they never knew existed.
Fourteen-year-old Shrey Parikh from California won the 98th Scripps National Spelling Bee on Thursday night, taking the title in a dramatic finale.
Nine competitors began the evening in the field. More than two hours later, only Parikh and 12-year-old Ishaan Gupta from New Jersey remained.
When neither could be separated after 18 rounds of spelling and vocabulary questions, officials turned to a rarely used tiebreaker known as a “spell-off”.
Introduced in 2021, the format gives each contestant 90 seconds to spell as many words as possible, making speed nearly as important as accuracy.
In a nail-biting finish, Parikh correctly spelled 32 words to Gupta’s 25, running a gantlet of obscure terms that ended with the word ‘cashaw’.
A century of spelling
The Scripps National Spelling Bee is a fixture on the American school calendar, with more than 11 million students joining local and regional competitions around the country.
This year’s event brought together 247 contestants, including some from the US territory of Guam, for a competition that’s trying to reinvent itself for a new generation of viewers.
While spelling is still the focus of the competition, which held its first event in 1925, organisers added a multiple-choice vocabulary round to the televised finals in 2021 to place greater emphasis on language knowledge rather than memorisation alone.
This year, as part of a “vibe shift” intended to give the competition a gameshow-like feel, the organisers worked with TV producer Michael Davies, known for revamping Jeopardy! and bringing Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? from the UK. They also tabbed ESPN talking head and Celebrity Jeopardy! champion Mina Kimes to host the coverage.
Vibes aside, contestants still had to memorise some of the most obscure words in the English language.
Competitors aged 9 to 15 faced words drawn from the Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary, ranging from scientific terms to loanwords from other languages. Think Jatrorrhiza, catometope, Faesulae and Kadohadacho – all, somehow, real words.
Winning words from past decades have ranged from familiar terms, including croissant and luge, to head-scratchers such as psammophile and éclaircissement.
For Parikh, correctly spelling ‘cashaw’ at the right moment capped years of preparation. He previously competed in 2022, finishing 89th, before catapulting to third place in 2024.
He told reporters afterwards that he had spent about five hours a day studying over the past year – a lot of hours to anyone, and enough to make this 14-year-old national champion.