After 14 rounds of words like “probouleutic” and “zwitterion” and “schistorrhachis,” Dev Shah, an eighth grader from Florida, had to wait for another commercial break. If he spelled the following word correctly, he would win the Scripps National Spelling Bee.

“Psammophile,” a plant or animal that prefers or thrives in sandy areas, is said to determine its fate.

He asked for all the information about the word – its definition, part of speech, spelling, use in a sentence – but he didn’t need it, as evidenced by a slight smile as he spoke. After three years of studying, he needed about 45 seconds to reach the apotheosis of his profession and become champion on Thursday evening.

“It’s surreal,” he said, holding the coveted Scripps Cup, the official championship trophy. “My legs are still shaking.”

Dev, 14, outlasted 228 other contestants, including 10 Thursday night finalists, to win $50,000 in cash and a commemorative medal. Charlotte Walsh, a second-place eighth grader from Virginia, will receive $25,000.

The moment was a highlight for Dev, who started participating in spelling bees in third grade and has been studying 10 hours a day for the past year, according to his mother. When his parents ran onto the stage to hug him, he felt overwhelmed, Dev said in a post-match interview.

“It gave me the assurance that I would never give up, no matter what,” he said Thursday night.

A fan of Roger Federer and the movie ‘La La Land’, Dev had participated in previous national spelling bees, taking 76th place in 2021 and 51st place in 2019. In 2022 he did not come out of the regional competition in his home state. The lone Floridian in the final, Dev, from Largo, outside St. Petersburg, gave the state its first winner since 1999.

Since he’s in eighth grade, this was his last year to compete, and he beat dictionary beasts like “chiromancy,” “schistorrhachis,” and “aegagrus.”

The competition has become more difficult over the past two years as organizers added new rules to challenge the spellers and avoid a repeat of 2019, which ended with an eight-way tie after four hours, extending the list of challenging words of the bee was exhausted. .

In 2021, the organizers introduced a vocabulary round, in which spellers must identify the correct meaning of the word. Last year they introduced the spell-off, an intense showdown where the remaining spellers have 90 seconds to spell as many words correctly as possible. Harini Logan, an eighth grader from San Antonio, won by spelling 21 words correctly.

The 2023 final started with 11 players, the youngest of them being Sarah Fernandes, an 11-year-old from Omaha. More than half were eighth graders and seasoned competitors by bee standards, representing a huge portion of the United States.

Despite their experience, there were some expected stumbling blocks.

The schwa — the “uh”-like sound that can be represented by any vowel in the English alphabet, also known as the bane of competitive spellers’ existence — knocked out several finalists, as it routinely does.

It eliminated Pranav Anandh in the ninth round, when he substituted an “i” for the first “e” in “querken”. In the 12th round, the treacherous schwa claimed two victims: Vikrant Chintanaboina (“pataca”, which he misspelled as “petaca”) and Aryan Khedkar (“pharetrone”, whom he misspelled as “pharotrone”).

The final three players were Charlotte, who tied for 32nd last year, and Surya Kapu, a 14-year-old eighth grader from Salt Lake City, who tied for fifth in 2022.

Surya fell into “kelep,” the word for a stinging ant from Central America, denying Utah its first national title and leaving Charlotte and Dev in the final high-stakes game.

He went first and correctly spelled “bathypitotmeter,” an instrument that measures the speed and temperature of water at certain depths.

Charlotte understood the word “daviely,” which means lethargic.

“Oh my god,” she said as she struggled, misspelling it DAVIELICK. Mary Brooks, the chief judge, rang the doorbell and gave Dev a chance to avoid the spell.

When Jacques A. Bailly, the bee’s pronouncer, presented psammophile, Dev said he recognized the two roots immediately, despite never having heard it before.

Deval Shah, Dev’s father, said that once his son “got rolling, he would be unbeatable”, adding that the words would unfold like “a slow stream, like a symphony is in progress”.

Mr. Shah first noticed Dev’s “remarkable memory” when he was 3 years old and became fascinated with a geography program on an iPad. His parents eventually turned that curiosity into spelling, with Mr. Shah as his first coach.

Scott Remer, his current coach, said it was clear that Dev felt strongly about his ability to spell the word Dr. Bailly threw at him.

“He has an ample memory, a real love of language and he was resilient,” he said. “I couldn’t be prouder.”

On Friday, runner-up Charlotte described how nervous she was for the final.

“I felt like I didn’t really deserve to be there,” she said. “But by finishing second I was able to prove to myself that I deserved it and that I had to rely on my own skills.”

With his two biggest stressors – high school and the spelling bee – behind him, Dev looked forward to going home next week and doing “normal things” with his friends. For now, he let the drop of confetti settle for a while.

“Ultimately, it’s your word,” he said. “It’s not like a football team. If the other team is better than your team, it will affect how the game goes. When it comes to spelling, it only matters which word you get and whether you can keep it up long enough.”

After 14 rounds of words like “probouleutic” and “zwitterion” and “schistorrhachis,” Dev Shah, an eighth grader from Florida, reached the apotheosis of his craft, correctly spelling “psammophile” to win the Scripps National Spelling Bee on Thursday night.

He denied the spelling community another exciting spell, outlasted the domineering Texans and didn’t sweat the schwa.

If you didn’t get to watch the final Thursday night, here are a few takeaways.

The schwa is a stone-cold killer

The schwa — the “uh”-like sound that can be represented by any vowel in the English alphabet, also known as the bane of competitive spellers’ existence — knocked out several finalists, as it routinely does.

It eliminated Pranav Anandh in the ninth round, when he substituted an “i” for the initial “e” in “querken”, meaning “to gasp”.

Two rounds later, it defeated Arth Dalsania, who switched an “a” for the “u” in “katuka”, a venomous snake also known as Russell’s viper. In the 12th round, the treacherous schwa claimed two victims: Vikrant Chintanaboina (“pataca”, which he misspelled as “petaca”) and Aryan Khedkar (“pharetrone”, whom he misspelled as “pharotrone”).

It’s hard to blame the participants, given that a schwa can be one of six letters – or none. It’s the “a” in balloon, the “e” in item, the “i” in family, the “o” in lemon, the “u” in support, the “y” in analysis and the, um, nothing for the “m” in rhythm.

The spell-off did not come true

Unlike last year, when the champion was determined by a first-ever spell-off after the regular word list was exhausted after 18 rounds, the bee didn’t need such extraordinary measures this time.

By the 14th round, the field had shrunk to two competitors: Dev and Charlotte Walsh. Dev walked over to the microphone, heard the word “bathypitotmeter” — “an instrument designed to record the current speed and water temperature at specified depths below the surface of a sea or lake,” says Merriam-Webster — and spelled it as if he recited his own name.

Walsh, meanwhile, was stunned by “daviely,” which she spelled “daevilick.”

All Dev had to do then was spell another word in round 15, and he did.

The bee turned out to be bigger than Texas

Texas contestants usually stack up to the finals, and they often win the title: In fact, four of the last seven bees were Lone Star State champions.

But of the 21 entrants from Texas in this year’s bee — more than from any other state — only one reached the final: Tarini Nandakumar, who was eliminated in the 10th round due to a vocabulary question.

In all, the 11 finalists represented much of the United States, from Utah to Pennsylvania and from Nebraska to Virginia. Four were from California, three of which were sponsored by the same San Ramon rotating club.

The lone Floridian in the final, Dev, from Largo, outside St. Petersburg, gave the state its first winner since 1999.

In the days leading up to the Scripps National Spelling Bee, participants made sure they knew their phonemes and root words. They weren’t the only ones.

On Sunday, Jacques A. Bailly gathered with the bee’s other speakers, along with the vocabulary team, in what he described as an “all word geek hands on deck” to go through the entire list of words and practice using say it out loud.

“We all listen and make sure all T’s are dotted and I’s crossed, or vice versa,” he said.

Mr. Bailly won the bee in 1980 at the age of 14, and has been pronouncing words for the contest since 2003. His interest in spelling dates back to first grade, when he learned to read using sounds, probing each consonant, symbol and letter until it formed a word – not much different from what he does for a national audience.

Mr. Bailly breakfast no bigger than usual before the game. He does not do vocal exercises and does not drink tea to relax his vocal cords. However, he has a few tricks to make sure he says a word on the first try.

First he tries to make eye contact with the speller and make the moment more human.

“I think, ‘Can I get this person to make human contact and try to put them at ease?'” he said.

Then, as the contestant walks to the stage, Mr. Bailly looks at the word and reads it quietly to himself.

“When you read English you go pretty fast and take things for granted and occasionally do a double take,” he said. “I try to do a double take every time.”

If that doesn’t work, he has two fact-checkers next to him to check whether he pronounces words correctly. If he ever overlooks anything, he is “well aware,” he said, of co-professor Brian Sietsema’s elbow and chief judge Mary Brooks’ eyebrows.

Competitors usually stumble over non-English words, he said, especially French, a language so seeped into English that he’s cited it as the reason spelling bees exist. Frans may even bump into Mr. Bailly, a professor of Greek and Latin at the University of Vermont.

“If there’s one word I find difficult to spell, it’s French,” he said.

Before a crowd of thousands in Cleveland on June 29, 1908, Marie C. Bolden, 14, defied the odds and won what is considered the first national spelling contest. She was the only black contestant.

She was named the individual champion and helped lead her Cleveland classmates to the team championship, but her success in the bee, held at the National Education Association’s annual convention, was met with racial prejudice. Confederate newspapers claimed that a New Orleans team lost because they were upset by Mrs. Bolden’s presence and the city’s superintendent vowed that his students would never compete in northern states again.

Kids on teams from Pittsburgh and Erie, Pa. – who had initially refused to compete against Ms. Bolden – shook her hand when she won.

“I didn’t enter the spelling contest for personal glory,” Ms Bolden, the daughter of a postman, told a reporter from The New York Times when she stepped off the stage. “But to try to honor my teacher and my school.”

The contest came 17 years before the first Scripps National Spelling Bee in 1925. In the decades that followed, black students faced discrimination and doubt. Nearly a century later, in June 2021, Zaila Avant-garde, a 14-year-old eighth grader, became the first black student to win the Scripps competition. The final of this year’s bee will be held Thursday night.

Mrs. Bolden would eventually marry and move to Canada. She never spoke of the victory, and the memory of it was lost, as was the medal she won.

Now, more than a century later, some of her descendants are trying to revive her story and recover her lost award.

“I can only speculate why she never mentioned it, but I suspect the experience of going from pride in victory to being caught in the middle of a storm of prejudice must have contributed,” Ms. Bolden’s grandson Mark Brown, a retired Toronto school teacher, said in a statement. “We didn’t start putting the details together until 1981 after her death,” he said.

Her story was recently taken up by researchers at the language learning platform Babbel, who were investigating the history of spelling bees in the United States. While no known images of the medal exist, the organization believes the award is gold, with a clasp or pin, and may have been inscribed with the words “Champion – American Public School Spellers,” “Cleveland Board Of Education,” or the year 1908 Anyone who finds it should contact the organization, according to the organization.

“When our research led us to her story, we couldn’t believe how little known and underappreciated it was,” Malcolm Massey, a language expert at the company, said in a statement. Ms Bolden’s statements at the time, he added, offered clues to her method: “Her parents and friends helped her memorize words, and she read a newspaper every day to perfect her spelling. It’s a blueprint for today’s future spelling bee champions.

Ms. Bolden was an unlikely champion – she finished last on her team and could have been replaced as schools across the country held spelling contests and competed for a spot in the national championship, which saw teams of eighth grade students from 34 cities attracted. 510 children in total, according to Cleveland. com.

The four teams in the final were from Cleveland, Erie, New Orleans and Pittsburgh. After learning of Ms. Bolden’s entry, the New Orleans team threatened to withdraw from the game.

Warren Hicks, the event organizer and Cleveland’s assistant superintendent of schools, argued that Ms. Bolden deserved to participate. “This historic event was planned to better promote spelling education in schools, but it resulted in more than that,” he later said. “It showed again that in our schools every boy and girl has a fair and equal chance.”

To participate, the students first took a written spelling test of 100 words. They then spelled 400 words out loud on stage at Cleveland’s Hippodrome Theater, a lavish playhouse that had opened last year.

Among the words Ms. Bolden spelled correctly were prejudice, persistence, misspelling, and embarrassment. She earned a perfect score.

But her victory sparked resentment among politicians and educators, some of whom refused to accept the result.

However, on the day of Ms. Bolden’s success, the convention was “flooded with a storm of applause,” according to an article published in The Oskaloosa announces, in Iowa. Booker T. Washington, who was born into a slave and later became an educator and political consultant, was in the audience.

According to Babbel, Dr. Washington took the stage after the event and remarked, “You will admit that we spell from the same spelling book as you. And I think you will also admit that we spell a little better.”

Derrick Bryson Taylor reporting contributed.

For nearly 100 years, the Scripps National Spelling Bee has showcased the greatest words of the youngest lexicologists. The inaugural champion, 11-year-old Frank Neuhauser of Louisville, correctly spelled “gladiolus” to claim a $500 prize at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History.

The words have only gotten louder, the pressure bigger and the nationwide spotlight bigger.

Of the 231 entrants, about a dozen finalists outsmarted them to reach the finals beginning at 8 p.m. Eastern Time on Thursdays on the Ion and Bounce networks and should run until about 10pm. The final spans nearly a week of competition the National Porta waterfront resort and development in Maryland.

Many Americans became familiar with the bee through its national broadcast on ESPN where it grew in popularity, viewership and popularity pop culture of the past decades. But that changed last year when the bee moved to Ion, a Scripps subsidiary, in the United States hopes to find viewers beyond paid TV subscribers.

According to the bee, that bet paid off: Viewership of the 2022 finale was up 147 percent year over year and was seen by 7.5 million viewers — the largest television audience since 2015.

The New York Times, which has written about spelling bees for nearly 150 years, will continue that tradition Thursday night, reporting live on the spellers’ stories and the words they face. Definitions come from the contest’s dictionary partner, Merriam-Webster. The champion takes home more than $50,000 in cash and multiple reference books such as a replica of the 1768 Encyclopaedia Britannica.

The sight is one that beekeepers say is understandably intimidating to the ordinary person out for a stroll: a sliver of sky that suddenly darkens amid the collective roar of thousands of honeybees before clustering on branches or bushes.

In Britain, the behavior known as swarming usually takes place from May to July and is a natural process in which a honey bee colony splits in two and leaves with a queen bee in search of a new home. But the country is currently experiencing a higher number of sightings for this time of year, most likely thanks to unusually warm weather that followed a cold, wet spell.

As a result, beekeepers and pest controllers who catch the swarms are reporting a flurry of calls for their help, as members of the public see the clusters in backyards, in chimneys, and even on barriers along city streets.

“We’re fully booked for the next four weeks,” said Rob Davies, a pest controller in Shropshire, central England, who specializes in dismantling and rebuilding structures such as chimneys to save honeybees. people calling for help.

Some bee rescuers even have to order new equipment to keep up with demand.

While it is difficult to put an exact figure on the current level of swarming, the British Beekeepers Association, which has nearly 30,000 members, said many were seeing more swarms than usual. Traffic to the association’s swarm removal site is up 19 percent from around this time last year, said Ian Campbell, a spokesman.

“It’s their form of large-scale reproduction,” said Mr. Campbell on the honey bees. “But this year it seemed to come a little earlier. It seems to be taking effect.”

Francis Ratnieks, a professor of beekeeping at the University of Sussex, said a recent spell of sunny, drier days in Britain had created optimal conditions for honeybee colonies to split off.

“It probably means we’ll have half-decent weather for once,” he said.

Alan Deeley, a beekeeper in Warwickshire in England’s West Midlands, said previous months’ weather was also a likely factor. Honeybee populations were bolstered last year by a long, hot and dry summer, he said, and then a period of cold, wet spring weather that dragged on into April, leading many beekeepers to stop inspecting their hives as often for fear of exposing their bees . to the cold.

“They got trapped in the hive, and that’s a trigger for them to swarm,” Mr Deeley said of the bees.

He said he had received at least twice as many calls this year about swarming and that beekeepers can sometimes prevent a colony from swarming, including by increasing a hive’s capacity.

The bees have attracted a lot of attention.

In Lancaster, a city in the northwest of England, a swarm attracted attention last week when a breaking on a metal pole on a stretch of sidewalk outside the office of a real estate agency. (A commenter on a Facebook post pointing it out joked that they were just looking for a new home.)

On the Isle of Guernsey, a crown area bordering Britain in the English Channel, the swarms were so numerous that Debbie Cox, the secretary of the local beekeepers’ association, recently ran out of the usual equipment and resorted to using a cardboard box to pick up a melon-sized swarm that had nestled in an apple tree in the backyard.

“It’s almost like the bees all over the country have all decided this year that they’re all going to swarm,” she said, adding that the group had already received about 30 calls this season, compared to half a dozen last season.

While honeybees tend to be docile rather than aggressive when swarming, beekeepers say people should still keep their distance if they see a large cluster.

The insects are pollinators that play a vital role for biodiversity and agriculture, and concerns about the decline of honey bee populations have arisen over the past decade due to the effects of pesticides and destructive mites, along with factors such as fungi and viruses. Other bee species, including bumblebees, have also faced ecological threats.

But the number of honey bee colonies managed globally has increased over the past 50 years, according to one longitudinal study published in the journal Nature last year, and beekeeping has boomed as a hobby in many places. Some beekeepers in Britain speculated that an increase in hobby beekeepers was a factor in the recent increase in swarms.

And since this is the start of the usual honeybee swarming season, Professor Ratnieks said if there was a surge, it wasn’t cause for concern. “It’s just part of spring,” he said, “as birds build their nests.”

“If there are a lot of swarms, it really means the bees are doing well,” he added.