8 National Spelling Bee finalists eye trophy, cash prize

Eight finalists will spell their hearts out on Thursday night in hopes of taking home the brightly painted Scripps National Spelling Bee trophy, along with more than $50,000 in cash and prizes.

The champion will not be Shradha Rachamreddy, who finished third last year and was a consensus favorite to go all the way. She was eliminated Wednesday on exactly the kind of “super short, complicated word” she said she focused on studying after misspelling “orle” last year. This year it was “varan”, a type of lizard. She added an extra “r” and former spellers in the audience gasped at her mistake.

“I’m in shock and desperate,” he said. Dev Shah, the 2023 champion.

“We all thought she was going to win,” added Charlotte Walsh, last year’s runner-up.

Starting in the quarterfinals, the bee’s word panel can use any of the more than half a million words in Webster’s Unabridged dictionary, plus some geographic names that are not even listed in that volume. Although the panel tries to maintain a consistent level of difficulty in each round, it may vary from word to word.

This year’s finalists are Rishabh Saha, 14; Shrey Parikh, 12; Aditi Muthukumar, 13; Bruhat Soma, 12; YY Liang, 12; Ananya Rao Prassanna, 13; Faizan Zaki, 12; and Kristen Tiffany Santos, 13.

Bruhat, a seventh grader from Tampa, Florida, will try to extend his winning streak to four on Thursday night when he competes for the championship title against seven other spellers, some of whom he defeated in the other bees.

The number of finalists is the lowest since 2010, when Scripps had to cut short a semifinal round for fear it would bring too few spellers to the primetime broadcast, then on ABC. The bee is now broadcast on Ion — owned by Scripps, a Cincinnati-based media company — and when Wednesday’s final semifinal round had a long delay after six of the top 10 spellers lost their words, a similar walkout did not appear in the question.

Scripps said the delay was due to technical issues that had plagued the bee all day. Live results were not posted as usual, and at one point former champion Kavya Shivashankar, tasked with saying a heartfelt goodbye to the spellers who heard the bell, received the wrong speller’s biography and began reading it before the crowd informed her about the confusion.

Despite some surprise eliminations in the semi-finals, the final eight are the usual impressive group – albeit on the young side. Only three are eighth graders in their final year of eligibility.

Shrey and Faizan are close friends of Bruhat, and all three are mentored by Evans.

“I’m not really surprised that any of my students made it this far. I know they’re all prepared. They have what it takes to win, all of them,” Evans said.

Bruhat in particular impressed his coach and other spectators with his clear command of the dictionary.

“We take so many words per class, more than I’ve seen with any other speller. His work ethic is incredible,” Evans said. “Once he gets a word wrong, he rarely gets it wrong again. He sees it and remembers it.”

Faizan became a crowd favorite during the semi-finals for his excitement at spelling correctly and for his empathy – he ran up and gave his good friend Aryan Khedkar a big hug when Aryan was eliminated.

“It was really sad to see him lose his senior year,” Faizan said. “So I just wanted to support him and help him get through this difficult time.”