Florida 12-year-old wins Scripps National Spelling Bee in rare spell-off final

The unbeatable 12-year-old Bruhat Soma won this year’s Scripps National Spelling Bee after a rare and dramatic spell-off final.

Bruhat, who has been the recent champion of other bees in the lead-up to the prestigious event, took home the spelling bee trophy and $50,000 in cash and prizes after a very intense tiebreaker in which he beat fellow competitor Faizan Zaki by spelling 29 words correctly.

The 96th Scripps National Spelling Bee commenced on Thursday at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center in National Harbor, Maryland.

With a total of 245 contestants from across all states as well as the District of Columbia, Guam, Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands and the Department of Defense Schools in Europe. Competitors also came from the Bahamas, Canada, and Ghana.

By Thursday night, after six rounds of spelling and vocabulary challenges, only eight competitors remained to take on each other in the final.

For Bruhat, a seventh grader from Tampa, Florida, he had just come off winning three other spelling bees in a row and was determined not to break his victorious streak and gain a fourth win in one of the most renowned spelling bees set in the English language.

“I’m really excited. It’s been my goal for this past year to win, and I’ve been working really hard,” Bruhat said on stage, gripping his trophy, CNNreported. “I really can’t describe it, I’m still shaking.”

Eventually, the final whittled down to just two remaining competitors, Bruhat and Faizan, who engaged in a rare ‘spell-off,’ the second time that one has ever happened in the decades-long run of the spelling bee.

Bruhat took to the microphone first and traversed through 30 words in the 90-second tiebreak, including: brouette, adelantado, hyporcheme, bisellium, mycteric, endecha, sericin, nyctalopia, ascham, wenzel, cebell, heautophany, kwazoku, panetiere, sagaie, nachschlage, exorhason, porphyrio, giclee, ashwagandha, puszta, asarotum, scintillante, myrabalanus, sciniph, voussoir, caizinha, ramoneur, aposiopesis, and abseil.

Despite being the clear winner in spelling 29 words correctly, he did make one error, where he spelled ‘porphyrio’ as p-o-r-p-h-e-r-i-o, according to The Guardian.

After Bruhat won, he was showered with a burst of confetti and was handed the trophy after spelling nine more correctly than his opponent, Faizan.

The winner had rehearsed the spell-off every day for six months.

“I was pretty confident that I had a chance at winning because I’ve been working so hard,” Bruhat said. “And I really wanted to win. That’s why I practiced the spell-off so much.”

16-year-old former speller Sam Evans, who coaches and tutors Bruhat, along with fellow finalists Faizan and Shrey Parikh, said that he was not surprised his students made it that far in the competition.

He described Bruhat as “competitive,” adding that he “likes winning.”

Before conquering the Scripps competition, the spelling prodigy had come off the back of winning the Words of Wisdom bee, the SpellPundit bee, as well as the first-ever online bee emceed by Dev Shah, last year’s Scripps spelling winner.

The road to victory in the Scripps national bee started with Bruhat joining the competition in 2022, where he came 163rd in a tie, then the following year, tying at 74th place before rising the ranks this year, according to his profile on the Scripps spelling website.

He is also described as a a lover of basketball, badminton, and ping-pong, as well as having a passion for music, playing the snare drum in his middle school band.