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Posted on 05/30/2026 5:26:59 AM PDT by Cronos
After three days of competition, 18 total rounds and one nail-biting, rapid-fire "spell-off," the Scripps National Spelling Bee has crowned its champion: 14-year-old Shrey Parikh
Over the course of two hours , the pool of nine finalists dropped to two: Parikh and 12-year-old Ishaan Gupta from Jersey City.bAfter each had nailed their eighth respective word, officials carried a sleek silver podium — with a buzzer on top — onto the stage, prompting huge gasps from the crowd. It was time for a spell-off.
"I was not excited at all, because to be honest, regular spelling I feel like is a much better show of what spelling is meant to be," Parikh told reporters "But I accepted the fact that there was going to be a spell-off, I calmed my mind, I got some water … and I just tried to take it all in stride and do the best I could."
Parikh and Gupta each had 90 seconds at the buzzer, alone on the stage, to spell as many words correctly as possible. Then, after a few minutes of careful counting, judges made it official: Parikh had crushed 32 words to Gupta's 25, ending in "cashaw" (a type of plant) and setting a new spell-off record.
Parikh will leave D.C. with $52,500 in cash and a slew of other perks, including hundreds of dollars' worth of reference works, flight credits and an astronaut meet-and-greet at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida.
He's also coming into some considerable free time: The 8th grader estimates he's spent about five hours a day working on spelling in the past year alone. He's excited to dive deeper into his other hobbies, especially tennis and math competitions. And, even before his win set in, he knew what message he wanted it to send.
(Excerpt) Read more at npr.org ...
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As the top two finalists, Ishaan Gupta (L) and Shrey Parikh (R) each had 90 seconds to spell as many words correctly as possible
Henderson?
Hew ye daen that to a right Born Scotsman?
This reminds me of the time I was in a spelling bee. My first word was easy, “funky”. But I didn’t hear the presenter correctly, and so replaced the n with a c.
I was disqualified from that tournament, and banned from all future tournaments.
I probably should have asked for the definition before spelling the word.
Too late now.
🤔
Stop blaming the schools. I heard an interview with this kid and he studied for this for years. He studied the spelling of over 150,000 words on his own time. He had a family that encouraged him. It also helped that a few of the words were Asian place names and as he said himself, he used his knowledge of Asian (Indian) spelling and phonetics to figure the words out. That would have been almost impossible for a Henderson or Smith to do other than by pure luck.
ok, seriously, children of Anglo-Saxon (white American) origin do participate and win the Scripps National Spelling Bee, but the competition has been notably dominated by Indian-American children over the last few decades. Since 1999, the vast majority of champions have been of South Asian descent.
Indians have a deep reverence for academic achievement, they raised their children with a strong emphasis on intense, disciplined academic pursuits
Henderson and Smith dominate on the football or baseball fields over the Parikhs and Duttas
:: I look forward to the day that a Henderson or Smith wins this thing. ::
Why?
The Henderson’s and the Smith’s have some equatorial tribesmen to do that for them.
About four of the last five were of Eastern Indian heritage, but quite sure they were born in the USA as they spoke US English.
I must post the link to the classic Cheap Seats episode on the 1997 Spelling Bee: https://youtu.be/1GABErQy45U
Looking back at the list of all the winners and the winning words (since 1941), the words they used in the old days, while very difficult to spell, were words that were more likely to be used in ordinary speech. Words like onerous, sarcophagus, vignette, sycophant, etc. But since I’d say the 1990s, it’s turned into this list of ultra-obscure, scientific/foreign words that no one would ever use in their lives and are insanely difficult to spell.
My two questions are always:
1)Which Indian won the Spelling Bee this year?
2)Which Kenyan won the Boston Marathon this year?
“...officials carried a sleek silver podium — with a buzzer on top — onto the stage...”
A person stands upon a podium, behind a lecturn.
Apparently this reporter doesn’t understand the English language.
It’s my understanding that most of these winners are home schooled - never public schooled.
They can spell well but cannot speak English well conversationally. Why is that?
More proof that teachers in this country just aren’t getting the job done. American kids can’t spell. All they are being taught in “skrewel” is how to give their genitals a good daily workout and liberal, commie democrat politics.
I won the first class-wide spelling bee in third grade in 1973. The teacher, Miss Adams, was a newly minted women’s libber. We didn’t get along. When I had to spell a second word at the end, she decided to have some fun with me, and made me spell “Ms.”, which wasn’t even a proper word, as it is sort of an abbreviation. She admitted as much, but just wanted to have fun. She wasn’t thin-skinned, and took plenty from a snarky third grader.
Not everything is a liberal plot. This has nothing to do with school. The kids in this spelling be are studying on their own time and many are home schooled.
No standard school in the US or the world is preparing kids for an event of this complexity.
White Americans don’t care about excellence anymore. They just want their bread and circuses.
An Indian won it? I'm shocked...
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