Meet Dev Shah, the 14-year-old who won the Scripps National Spelling Bee with ‘psammophile’

Associated Press via NBC News ^ | 06/02/2023

[SeekAndFind]

OXON HILL, Md. (AP) — Fifteen months ago, Dev Shah spent a miserable five hours spelling outdoors in chilly, windy, damp conditions at a supersize regional competition in Orlando, Florida, only to fall short of his dream of returning to the Scripps National Spelling Bee.

“Despondent is the right word,” Dev said. “I just didn’t know if I wanted to keep continuing.”

Look at him now.

Soft-spoken but brimming with confidence, Dev asked precise questions about obscure Greek roots, rushed through his second-to-last word and rolled to the National Spelling Bee title Thursday night.

Dev, a 14-year-old from Largo, Florida, first competed at the national bee in 2019, then had his spelling career interrupted. The 2020 bee was canceled because of COVID-19, and in the mostly virtual 2021 bee, he didn’t make it to the in-person finals.

He flexed his knowledge in Wednesday’s early rounds by asking questions that proved he knew every relevant detail the bee’s pronouncers and judges had on their computer screens. And when it was all over, he held the trophy over his head as confetti fell.

Dev’s winning word was “psammophile,” a layup for a speller of his caliber.

“Psammo meaning sand, Greek?” he asked. “Phile, meaning love, Greek?”

Dev soaked up the moment by asking for the word to be used in a sentence, something he described a day earlier as a stalling tactic. Then he put his hands over his face as he was declared the winner.

[Justa]

“Arikomban: Rampaging killer elephant claims 11th victim in India”

https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/4157812/posts

I guess America invented modern living and became a leader in science and enterprise because there are no elephants.

[Wuli]

Immigrants come here to improve their lives and the good ones come legally and most of them have good strong families. Dev to that in saying why he did so well - parents that gave him encouragement and support - parents showed they believed in him.

[Albion Wilde]

bump

[GingisK]

I wonder if those kids can figure out the clock system of an STM32L468 ARM microprocessor.

[DarrellZero]

I never saw the point of spelling bees.

Who spells words without writing them down?

[AnotherUnixGeek]

I guess America invented modern living and became a leader in science and enterprise because there are no elephants.

Only because the first people to cross the land bridge from Asia and come down into North and South America apparently killed all of the mammoths. It's a shame, really - I wouldn't mind seeing some Colombian mammoths wandering around the Midwest plains.

[Moltke]

If a white student had one it...

Sorry, but that is not particularly impressive in a spelling bee thread.

[higgmeister]

You mean like a geoduck?

[higgmeister]

Why did you post a photo of Sammy Hager?

[one guy in new jersey]

I too am a Sammophile.

[MIchaelTArchangel]

They should have given him a word like pissantophile, that is a person who love politicians.

[EliRoom8]

Always appreciate the Far Side.

[adorno]

Gawd...with so many things to learn....why would I spend so much time on learning to spell words that I will never use.

A lot of it is about the parents, who want their kids to show how smart they are and who raised them. It's about the ego of the parents. It's about feeling special.

\ IOW, 'look how smart "MY" kid is'.

But, you're right; there are other endeavors which are more important than winning the spelling bee and knowing how to spell every word in the language.

And, those kids will not have a normal kid's life, since the parents have them slaving to prove to be better than the other kids.

BTW, my daughter has two girsl which are home-schooled. They are doing excellent, and one of them has been doing college math at the age of ten, while both are above grade level in all the subjects. But, both girls have a normal kids' life, doing Tai-quon-do and gymnastics and taking singing and acting lessons, and they have a lot of friends. Point being that, they don't have to prove anything, other than what they love doing. My daughter is not a slave driver. Those spelling-bee kids likely have very lonely lives.

[euram]

I remember several years ago people arguing that the word yacht in a spelling bee was “racist” since blacks don’t know anything about yachts.

[LizzieD]

In case you’ve never had a child participate in the National Spelling Bee, each year a book is published of the words that they may be asked to spell. It’s a big book, and there are many hard words, but it’s not like they must study the entire dictionary. Highly disciplined students - often because of their very achievement oriented parents - study these words RELENTLESSLY. Several home-schoolers have won because they make studying them part of their daily curriculum.

[napscoordinator]

White are being over taken. Much of that is from laziness and entitlement.

[dfwgator]

Hard times make good men
Good men make good times
Good times make weak men
Weak men make hard times

We got fat, dumb and happy, and now, here we are.

[napscoordinator]

Yep. Self fulling prophecy.

[dfwgator]

A hard rain is gonna fall.

[one guy in new jersey]

For a number of reasons, spelling (particularly in English) is artificially difficult.

Hence these spelling bees are, at heart, celebrations of how hard we humans work to make our lives unnecessarily and impossibly intricately difficult.

In some ways it’s as if we’re happy God punished us for building the Tower of Babel by imposing a multiplicity of languages and scattering us to the four winds.