Indian-American student Shrey Parikh, aged 14, from California, won the Scripps National Spelling Bee on Friday after correctly spelling 32 of 35 words in 90 seconds.
Parikh, an eighth-grade student from Day Creek Intermediate School, spelt ‘Bromocriptine’ correctly in the 90-second spell-off beating seventh grader 12-year-old Ishaan Gupta of Frank R Conwell Middle School, Jersey City, New Jersey.
Twelve-year-old Sarv Dharavane from Peachtree Charter Middle School in Tucker, Georgia finished third.
Ishaan takes home USD 25,000, while Sarv gets USD 15,000 in prize money.
Parikh also beat the previous spell-off record set in 2024 by Bruhat Soma, who spelled 29 out of 30 words correctly in the spell-off.
“Spelling fast is what I do every day,” Shrey said in comments after winning the competition.
Parikh, who was also a finalist in the 2024 edition of the competition, takes home a slew of prizes, including USD 50,000, a commemorative medal, the Scripps Cup, as well as USD 2,500 from Merriam-Webster, USD 1,000 in flight credits from Delta and USD 400 of reference works from Encyclopaedia Britannica.
The three-day competition began Monday at D.A.R. Constitution Hall here with 247 contestants from all 50 states and the District of Columbia, Guam, Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, Defence Department schools in Europe and five other countries: the Bahamas, Canada, Ghana, Nigeria and the United Arab Emirates.
Nine contestants advanced to the finals that were held on Thursday evening.
Shrey and Ishaan each had 90 seconds to correctly spell as many words as they could, served from the same list.
Shrey previously competed in 2022 and tied for 89th place, and in 2024 tied for third place.
According to the biography shared by Spelling Bee, Shrey has many hobbies, including tennis, reading, math and chess.
He plays percussion in his school band and has played snare drum, bass drum, timpani, toms, break drum, triangle, glockenspiel and marimba.
Shrey spends his free time either doing math problems or goofing around with his brother and sister. He has visited many countries and especially enjoys going to India to see his grandparents.
One of Shrey’s proudest accomplishments, other than spelling, was qualifying for the California state Mathcounts competition this year.
The Spelling Bee competition was first held in 1925 to test spelling, vocabulary and language skills through multiple rounds of increasingly difficult words.
Participants must generally be no older than 15 years and may not have progressed beyond the eighth grade.
Balu Natarajan became the first Indian origin student to win the competition in 1985. Indian origin students have dominated the competition and won titles over the past four decades.
Of the nine finalists this year, five were of Indian origin.
(With inputs from PTI)
