Bruhat Soma wins 2024 Scripps National Spelling Bee

Bruhat Soma emerged victorious in the Scripps National Spelling Bee on Thursday, winning more than $50,000 in cash and prizes.

This year's contest came down to a tiebreaker in which Soma spelled 29 words correctly in 90 seconds, beating Faizan Zaki, who managed to spell 20 words correctly in the blitz round.

Bruhat was first in the tiebreaker, and after going past 30 words, it looked like he would be impossible to beat. Faizan's pace was more uneven early on. Tried 25 words, but deleted four.

Shortly after Bruhat was showered with confetti and presented with the trophy, Faizan was crying on the side of the stage, accepting hugs from other spellers. A few minutes earlier, he had hugged his good friend, Shrey Parikh, after Shrey was knocked out on stage.

Bruhat, a seventh grader from Tampa, Fla., extended his winning streak to four, having won three previous spelling bees en route to the Scripps National Spelling Bee.

She won the Words of Wisdom bee hosted by Scott Remer, a former spelling bee author, coach and study guide. He won the SpellPundit bee hosted by this study guide company. And he won the first online challenge from last year's Scripps National Spelling Bee champion, Dev Shah.

Shradha Rachamreddy, who finished third last year and was the consensus favorite to go all the way, was eliminated on Wednesday with exactly the kind of “super short, complicated word” she said she concentrated on studying after 'misspelling “orle” last year. This year it was “varan”, a kind of lizard. He added an extra “r” and the old spellers in the audience were dumbfounded by his mistake.

“I'm in a state of shock and despair,” 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 Comprehensive Dictionary, plus some geographic names that don't even appear in this volume. Although the panel tries to maintain a constant level of difficulty in each round, it can vary from word to word.

This year's other finalists including finalists are Rishabh Saha, 14; Shrey Parikh, 12; Aditi Muthukumar, 13; YY Liang, 12; Ananya Rao Prassanna, 13; and Kristen Tiffany Santos, 13.

The number of finalists was the fewest since 2010, when Scripps had to halt a semifinal round over fears it would bring too few spelling comments to primetime, then on ABC. The bee now airs on Ion, owned by Scripps, a Cincinnati media company, and when Wednesday's final round of semifinals was heavily delayed after six of the top 10 spellers missed their words, no a similar stop appeared. question

Scripps said the delay was due to technical issues that plagued the bee throughout the day. The live results were not posted as usual, and at one point former champion Kavya Shivashankar, tasked with saying a heartfelt goodbye to the bell-listening spellers, was given the wrong speller's bio and started to read it before the crowd reported it. the confusion

Despite some surprising semi-final eliminations, the eight finalists are the usual impressive bunch, albeit on the young side. Only three are eighth graders in their final year of eligibility.

Shrey and Faizan are close friends with 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 ready. They've got what it takes to win, all of them,” Evans said.

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

“We get so many words in per class, more than I've seen with any other spelling bee. Their work ethic is amazing,” Evans said. “Once a word is lost, it would very rarely be lost again. He sees it and remembers it.”

Faizan became a crowd favorite during the semi-finals for his excitement when he spelled correctly and for his empathy – he rushed over and hugged his good friend Aryan Khedkar 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, like, get him through this tough time.”