Final flurry of words wins National Spelling Bee for Shrey Parikh
CNN
By Scottie Andrew, CNN
(CNN) — Cywyddau. Taurokathapsia. Natchitoches.
Shrey Parikh correctly spelled these and more tricky terms to win the Scripps National Spelling Bee, which ended in a tense and record-breaking speed round.
The 14-year-old Californian survived 18 regular rounds of the spelling competition plus a “spell-off” tiebreaker, during which he correctly spelled an unprecedented 32 words in 90 seconds. He won with “bromocriptine,” a “polypeptide alkaloid that is a derivative of ergot and mimics the activity of dopamine.”
It was Shrey’s third time at the big bee and his final year of eligibility, but he had come close to victory before: He finished third in 2024 and shockingly missed the cut for the national competition last year, so he took six months off from spelling before reopening his Merriam-Webster dictionary.
Runner-up Ishaan Gupta, 12, put up an impressive 25 words in the spell-off. Three-time bee veteran Sarv Dharavane finished in third place for the second year straight. He misspelled “disa,” a tropical African terrestrial orchid.
Parikh barely broke a sweat through “philepitta” and “potto,” terms for genuses of an African bird and primate, respectively. Upon winning, the eighth-grader said the final round of the bee felt like “just another day of spelling.”
“Spelling fast is what I do every day,” Shrey said while hoisting the Scripps Cup high. “A spell-off just came naturally.”
Spell-offs, which were introduced in 2021, are becoming something of a biannual trend at the National Spelling Bee: The 2022 and 2024 winners were determined in the speed rounds. But Shrey beat both of those winners’ records with 32 correct spellings out of around 35 words.
The preternaturally professional young competitors made it through rounds of obscure nouns like “hwyl” and “Igdyr.” Fifth-place finisher Logan Bailey couldn’t believe his luck when he correctly spelled “ceutorhynchus,” used to describe “a large nearly cosmopolitan genus of weevils.” He was ultimately felled by “Quincke tube,” though he was briefly delighted when longtime bee pronouncer Jacques Bailly referenced “KPop Demon Hunters” in a sentence that included the term.
As champion, Shrey takes home more than $50,000 in cash prizes, plus a trip to the Universal Orlando Resort theme parks. Merriam-Webster offers the winner a one-year subscription to its unabridged online reference book, too, should he, for some unknown reason, need it.
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