Latest news with #BruhatSoma
Fox News
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Fox News
Teen from Allen, Texas wins Scripps National Spelling Bee with 'eclaircissement'
No éclaircissement was needed after 13-year-old Faizan Zaki triumphed in the 21st round of the Scripps National Spelling Bee. The teen collapsed on the floor with excitement after correctly spelling "éclaircissement" and securing the national title — not to mention a trophy and $50,000. Zaki's win also coincided with a major milestone: the 100th anniversary of the Scripps National Spelling Bee. When spelling the "M-E-N-T" in "éclaircissement," Zaki, who hails from Allen, Texas, was understandably thrilled after coming in second place at last year's competition behind Bruhat Soma, who was 12 years old when he took home the trophy. However, his victory didn't come without drama — Zaki nearly lost in round 18 when asked to spell "commelina." Zaki started saying "K-A-M" before stopping himself and telling head judge Mary Brooks to "just ring the bell," which she did. Zaki got another shot after 14-year-old Sarvadnya Kadam misspelled "Uaupes" in round 20 — paving the way for his win with "éclaircissement." In a post on X congratulating the 13-year-old, the Scripps National Spelling Bee wrote that Zaki "left everything on stage." "He's the GOAT. I actually believe that. He's really good, man. He's been doing it for so long, and he knows the dictionary in and out," Zaki's father, Said Zaki Anwar told ESPN. Zaki's win was notable not only for the final word and the Bee's centennial, but also because it marked the first time in nearly 25 years that a former runner-up returned to win the title. According to ESPN, the last person to do so was Sean Conley, who was the 2001 champion. Zaki and Conley are members of an extremely exclusive club with just five members total from the event's 100 years. The final three in the 2025 competition also included 11-year-old Sarv Dharavane, who would have been the competition's youngest champion since Nihar Janga, who won in 2016. Zaki's stumble over "commelina" and subsequent comeback are not the first examples of drama at the spelling bee. This children's competition has produced a surprising number of historic moments. In 2019, the spelling bee's results were arguably some of the most controversial, as the competition ended with the only eight-way tie in the Scripps National Spelling Bee's history.
The Independent
a day ago
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Faizan Zaki, 13, w-i-n-s 2025 Spelling Bee after coming in second last year
Thirteen-year-old Faizan Zaki from Plano, Texas, won the finals of the Scripps National Spelling Bee Thursday night with the head-twisting word 'éclaircissement.' His voice began to crack as he neared final letters of his winning word, and he dropped to the floor after nailing it at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Cent er in National Harbor, Maryland. The bee's executive director, Corrie Loeffler, said the final faceoff had 'about the most exciting ending I've ever seen,' The New York Times noted. Last year, Bruhat Soma, 12, from St. Petersburg, Florida, beat Zaki in the second-ever spell-off in the history of the competition. Zaki was the only 2024 finalist to also compete in this year's final. The champion takes home a prize of $50,000, with cash rewards also handed to the next five finishers. Last year, a 90-second spell-off was required for final victory. The tie-breaking round emphasized speed as much as accuracy. When the fourth round of the 2025 finals got underway, six spellers remained. Thirteen-year-old Akshaj Somisetty, from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, was ousted in the second round. The last six spellers in the competition hailed from California, New Jersey, New York, Georgia, Texas, and North Carolina. The third round saw the departure of Esha Marupudi, 13, from Phoenix Arizona, after misspelling 'aromorphosis,' and Oliver Halkett, 13, from Los Angeles, who was unable to spell 'aurore.' Harini Murali, from Edison, New Jersey, was knocked out in the seventh round after missing 'tekke,' a word with Turkish origins meaning a dervish monastery. Similarly, Brian Liu, 13, from Great Neck, New York, was also knocked out after mistakenly using an 'i' when spelling 'kyah.' Aishwarya Kallakuri, 14, from Charlotte, North Carolina, departed after not getting 'Keighley' quite right. Many of the words were so challenging that captioning on the livestream of the competition was inaccurate. The tenth round saw Sarvadnya Kadam, 14, from Visalia, California, misspelling 'Uaupés,' a river going through Colombia and Brazil. The youngest finalist, 11-year-old Sarv Dharavane, left after slipping up on 'eserine' in the ninth round. Zaki had an opportunity to win in the eighth round following mistakes by Kadam and Dharavane. However, he started spelling the word 'commelina' with the letters 'k-a-m.' There were several rounds in a row without any mistakes from the spellers during the evening. But things began to change during the seventh round when several spellers left the competition. That left Zaki, Kadam, and Dharavane to fight to the b-i-t-t-e-r end. The week began with 243 participants from the 50 states as well as Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the Northern Mariana Islands. Spellers from the Bahamas, Canada, Germany, Ghana, Kuwait, and Nigeria also took part. As many as 178 contestants took part for the first time, and roughly 30 percent of the contestants were 14, with the youngest being eight. Spellers had 90 seconds to correctly spell a word after it had been pronounced. They could ask for a definition, a part of speech the word fit, that the word be used in a sentence, its language of origin, alternative ways of saying the word, or simply for the pronouncer to repeat the word. The official source for the Spelling Bee is Merriam-Webster Unabridged. The competition began 100 years ago. It was cancelled, however, four times, between 1943 and 1945 because of the Second World War, and in 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Mostly due to an eight-way tie in 2019, as many as 109 champions have been crowned over the years, including 56 boys and 53 girls.
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Scripps National Spelling Bee finals air Thursday night
May 29 (UPI) -- The final round of the prestigious Scripps National Spelling Bee gets underway at 8 p.m. EDT on Thursday with nine contestants vying for the title. The event pits 243 spelling champions from every state and the U.S. territories of Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands and the Northern Mariana Islands to determine which one earns the Scripps Cup during the spelling competition's 100th year. Contestants from Canada, the Bahamas, Germany, Ghana, Kuwait and Nigeria also compete for the title. National Spelling Bee contestants must not be older than age 15 or have progressed beyond the eighth grade. They advance to the National Spelling Bee by competing in regional competitions. This year's nine finalists are between the ages of 11 and 14. Last year's runner-up, Faizan Zaki, 13, from Allen, Texas, is among the nine finalists. He lost in a tie-breaking spell-off to last year's winner, Bruhat Soma. The winner receives a custom trophy, $52,500 in cash prizes, a commemorative medal and a one-year subscription to reference works from Merriam-Webster and the Encyclopedia Britannica. All finalists receive at least $2,000, with the second-place finisher winning $25,000. More than one person can tie for the championship. When two or more contestants tie for the title, each receives the $50,000 grand prize from the National Spelling Bee. The finals will be aired live on ion, which is available via streaming and many television cable and satellite subscription services. This year's National Spelling Bee began on Tuesday, when 60 contestants were eliminated during a preliminary spelling and vocabulary round. Another 84 spellers were eliminated later on Tuesday after completing a written spelling and vocabulary test. Three quarterfinal rounds held narrowed the field to 57 semifinalists on Wednesday, and four semifinal rounds produced the nine contestants who qualified for Thursday night's final round. The Scripps National Spelling Bee has been held annually since 1925, when nine students competed for the title. It was suspended from 1943 to 1945 due to World War II and in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The competition has created a historical archive to celebrate the spelling competition's centennial year. This year's competition is its 97th and is being held at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center in National Harbor, Md., which has hosted the event since 2011.
New York Times
2 days ago
- General
- New York Times
Faizan Zaki, Last Year's Runner-Up, Is a Favorite to Win This Year's Spelling Bee
For the past year, Faizan Zaki, 13, had a schedule that would rival that of professional athletes. He trained five to six hours a day on weekdays and seven to eight hours on weekends. His reps were words. Lots and lots of words. As last year's runner-up, he is a favorite to win this year's Scripps National Spelling Bee. And he has never studied harder, he said confidently hours before he was set to take the stage Thursday evening. The seasoned speller from Plano, Texas, was the only 2024 finalist who advanced to the 2025 finals. 'A lot of people are looking to me to beat what I got last year,' he said over the phone. He took a bit of a different approach in preparing this year, to increase his speed and improve his vocabulary. Once he got home from school, he would open the dictionary and look for words he hadn't seen before. He'd keep track of them in a document, focusing on the definition and spelling of each word. This year, Faizan also studied specifically for the spell-off, the final tiebreaking round that cost him a win last year. In the spell-off, finalists have 90 seconds to spell as many words from a shared list of 30 as possible. Bruhat Soma defeated Faizan last year, spelling 29 words correctly to Faizan's 20 words. The spell-off was required to end the contest last year. This year, the rules have been amended so that the spell-off is optional if judges deem the contest has gone on for too long. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
The Guardian
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Once in 44 years: Faizan Zaki looks to buck the National Spelling Bee's toughest trend
With the benefit of hindsight, Vikram Raju knows there was almost no chance he would win after being a runner-up in the 2022 Scripps National Spelling Bee. 'The chances of getting that high are infinitesimally small, and the chances of doing it again are an order of magnitude smaller, obviously,' Vikram said Wednesday. 'So it's a really daunting feeling as well because you always try to outdo yourself from the previous year.' Don't tell Faizan Zaki those odds. Faizan, who lost to Bruhat Soma in a 'spell-off' tiebreaker last year, was the only speller to earn a perfect score on the written spelling and vocabulary test that determined this year's quarter-finalists. Then he breezed through seven rounds on Wednesday to become one of nine spellers who will compete in Thursday night's finals for a trophy and more than $50,000 in cash and prizes. And he's done it all with insouciant flair, sauntering to the microphone in a black hoodie, shaggy hair in his face. Once he's sure of the word, he takes his hands out of his sweatshirt pouch and matter-of-factly says each letter while he mimics typing in the air. The 13-year-old seventh-grader from Allen, Texas, finally showed a bit of vulnerability on 'coterell', the word that got him to the finals, and he celebrated with a big fist pump after racing through its eight letters. 'It was just very relieving. I have a lot of expectations put on me, so I'm just excited that I'm going to the finals again,' Faizan said. No matter how often he flexes his knowledge of roots and unfamiliar language patterns, historical trends suggest Faizan is an underdog. In 96 bees over 100 years, only four runners-up have later gone on to win, and just one did so in the last 44 years: Sean Conley, the 2001 champion who finished second the year before. 'Hopefully I can get it done,' Faizan said. 'Especially back home, all of my friends, they tell me that I need to win this year.' Disappointment has taken many forms for recent runners-up. Naysa Modi, who finished second in 2018, was eliminated in 2019 by a written test that winnowed the field to 50 spellers, only to watch in dismay as the bee declared eight co-champions who aced words that she also knew. Simone Kaplan, the runner-up to those 2019 'octo-champs', didn't get a chance to come back because the 2020 bee was canceled due to Covid-19. Chaitra Thummala, runner-up to Zaila Avant-garde in 2021, never contended again, even though she had two more years before she aged out of the competition. Spellers can't be older than 15 or past the eighth grade. Then came Vikram, who didn't make it back in 2023 after a regional bee in Denver that lasted 53 rounds over a span of more than five hours. Vikram and his parents unsuccessfully appealed to Scripps that he misspelled because the bee's pronouncer made one of several mistakes. Now 15, Vikram returned to the bee to support his younger brother, Ved – who bowed out in the semi-finals – and he's long past any bitter feelings about how his spelling career ended. 'Even if you know every single word in the dictionary, there are just factors that are completely out of your control,' Vikram said. 'The nerves might get too big someday. Maybe the audience is distracting you in that one moment. Maybe your tongue slips. Maybe you get too excited.' 'I don't want to say that luck is the most important factor, but it's a huge factor in this competition,' he continued. Jacques Bailly has been the bee's lead pronouncer for 22 years, or nearly three times as long as this year's youngest speller has been alive. Yet meeting Bailly was the highlight of a precocious bee debut for Zachary Teoh, an 8-year-old second-grader from Houston. 'We got to read the dictionary together!' Zachary exclaimed. Zachary was better than half the field in his bee debut. Out of 243 spellers, his official placement was a tie for 74th place after he bowed out on a vocabulary word – 'manifold' – during the quarterfinals. He said he felt like it was among the more difficult vocabulary questions, and he knew how to spell the word even though he couldn't define it. If Zachary somehow makes it back to the bee in each of his six remaining years of eligibility, he would break the record of six appearances held by Akash Vukoti, who debuted in 2016 at age 6 and spelled his final word in 2023. Zachary wore a green tartan cardigan that he said has been his lucky garment since kindergarten. It's getting a bit snug. 'If they give me a new one,' he said, referring to his proud parents, 'I can wear both.'
