This Year’s Spelling Bee Champion Didn’t Schweat the Schwa
The moment was a culmination for Dev, who began competing in spelling bees in third grade and has studied 10 hours each day for the past year, according to his mother. When his parents rushed the stage to hug him, he felt overwhelmed, Dev said in an interview after the competition.
“It gave me the reassurance that I should never give up, no matter what,” he said Thursday night.
A fan of Roger Federer and the movie “La La Land,” Dev had competed in previous national spelling bees, tying for 76th place in 2021 and 51st place in 2019. In 2022, he did not make it out of the regional competition in his home state. The lone Floridian in the finals, Dev, from Largo, outside St. Petersburg, gave the state its first winner since 1999.
Because he is in eighth grade, this was his last year to compete, and he bested beasts of the dictionary like “chiromancy,” “schistorrhachis” and “aegagrus.”
The competition has become more difficult in the last two years, as its organizers have added new rules to challenge the spellers and to avoid a repeat of 2019, which ended with an eight-way tie after four hours that exhausted the bee’s list of challenging words.
In 2021, organizers introduced a vocabulary round, in which spellers have to identify the correct meaning of the word. Last year, they introduced the spell-off, an intense showdown in which the remaining spellers have 90 seconds to spell as many words correctly as possible. Harini Logan, an eighth grader from San Antonio, won by correctly spelling 21 words.
Source: The New York Times
