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Shrey Parikh emerged victorious Thursday in the 98th annual Scripps National Spelling Bee. The 14-year-old eighth-grader from Rancho Cucamonga, California, bested a field of eight contenders who had advanced to the finals.
Shrey and 12-year-old Ishaan Gupta of Jersey City, New Jersey, were the last two spellers standing. The two went to a spell-off to determine the winner. In the spell-off, each had 90 seconds to spell as many words as possible.
Shrey spelled 32 words correctly, while Ishaan spelled 25.
The spell-off moves so fast that it’s impossible to tell which word secures the title. But Scripps later announced that the winner was “bromocriptine,” a polypeptide alkaloid that mimics the activity of dopamine.
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Shrey will take home a cash prize of $52,500, along with the reference works from Encyclopaedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster, a custom trophy and commemorative medal, and $1,000 in flight credits from Delta Air Lines.
Although this was the 98th bee, Shrey is the 111th champion because the bee ended in a two-way tie several times, and an eight-way tie in 2019.
Shrey 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 online competitions against many of the same kids he outlasted this week in the nation’s capital.
“Right now I’m probably the happiest I’ve ever been. I’m just so happy and relieved, and just such a flood of emotions,” Shrey said. “At my school bee last year, I was really dejected and just very upset. It didn’t even sink in until the next day. I had a really tough time, but I’m glad I was able to bounce back.”
Spellers qualified for Thursday’s finals by advancing through regional bees hosted by sponsors around the country. In order to compete, spellers must not have advanced beyond the eighth grade or be older than 15.
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.
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 first bee was held in 1925, when the Louisville Courier-Journal invited other newspapers to host spelling bees and send their champions to Washington. After a long run at a convention center in suburban Maryland, the bee returned to the nation’s capital this year at Constitution Hall, a few blocks from the White House.
The bee was canceled from 1943 to 1945 because of World War II and again in 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
