The countdown to the 2022 Scripps National Spelling Bee is on.

This year, the Bee will welcome 234 spellers from May 31 to June 2 for the national rounds in National Harbor, Maryland.

Spellers will represent four countries in addition to the U.S., including the Bahamas, Canada, Germany and Ghana.

There will be spellers from other U.S. territories, including the Virgin Islands, Guam and Puerto Rico.

The youngest speller this year is just 7 years old.

The spelling competition will be fully in-person for the first time since 2020. In 2021, it was held mostly in a virtual format with the finals taking place in person.

The champion this year will receive a $50,000 cash prize.

Preliminaries will begin May 31, quarterfinals are scheduled for June 1 and finals will take place June 2.

Actor and educator LeVar Burton will serve as the host during the semifinal and final rounds.

Fifteen months ago, Dev Shah spent a miserable five hours spelling outdoors in chilly, windy, damp conditions at a supersize regional competition in Orlando, Florida, only to fall short of his dream of returning to the Scripps National Spelling Bee.

"Despondent is the right word," Dev said. "I just didn't know if I wanted to keep continuing."

Look at him now.

Soft-spoken but brimming with confidence, Dev asked precise questions about obscure Greek roots, rushed through his second-to-last word and rolled to the National Spelling Bee title Thursday night.

Dev, a 14-year-old from Largo, Florida, in the Tampa Bay area, first competed at the national bee in 2019, then had his spelling career interrupted. The 2020 bee was canceled because of COVID-19, and in the mostly virtual 2021 bee, he didn't make it to the in-person finals, held in his home state on ESPN's campus at Walt Disney World.

Then came the disaster of last year, when he was forced to compete in the Orlando region because his previous regional sponsor didn't come back after the pandemic.

"It took me four months to get him back on track because he was quite a bit disturbed and he didn't want to do it," said Dev's mother, Nilam Shah.

When he decided to try again, he added an exercise routine to help sharpen his focus and lost about 15 pounds, she said.

Dev got through his region. He flexed his knowledge in Wednesday's early rounds by asking questions that proved he knew every relevant detail the bee's pronouncers and judges had on their computer screens. And when it was all over, he held the trophy over his head as confetti fell.

"He appreciated that this is a journey, which sounds very trite but is really quite true," said Dev's coach, Scott Remer, a former speller and study guide author. "I think the thing that distinguishes the very best spellers from the ones that end up not really leaving their mark is actually just grit."

Dev's winning word was "psammophile," a layup for a speller of his caliber.

"Psammo meaning sand, Greek?" he asked. "Phile, meaning love, Greek?"

Dev soaked up the moment by asking for the word to be used in a sentence, something he described a day earlier as a stalling tactic. Then he put his hands over his face as he was declared the winner.

"I would say I was confident on the outside but inside I was nervous, especially for my winning word — well, like, before. Not during," he said.

Runner-up Charlotte Walsh gave Dev a congratulatory hug.

"I'm so happy for him," said Charlotte, a 14-year-old from Arlington, Virginia. "I've known Dev for many years and I know how much work he's put into this and I'm so, so glad he won."

The winner's haul is more than $50,000 in cash and prizes. When Charlotte returned to the stage later to congratulate Dev again, he reminded her that the runner-up gets $25,000.

"Twenty-five thousand! What? I didn't know that," Charlotte said.

Earlier, when the bee was down to Dev and Charlotte, Scripps brought out the buzzer used for its "spell-off" tiebreaker, and Dev was momentarily confused when he stepped to the microphone.

"This is not the spell-off, right?" Dev asked. Told it was not, he spelled "bathypitotmeter" so quickly that it might as well have been.

"I practiced for the spell-off every day, I guess. I knew it might happen and I prepared for everything, so I kind of went into spell-off mode," he said. "But I also was scared for the spell-off."

Dev is the 22nd champion in the past 24 years with South Asian heritage. His father, Deval, a software engineer, immigrated to the United States from India 29 years ago to get his master's degree in electrical engineering. Dev's older brother, Neil, is a rising junior at Yale.

Deval said his son showed an incredible recall with words starting at age 3, and Dev spent many years in participating in academic competitions staged by the North South Foundation, a nonprofit that provides scholarships to children in India.

The bee began in 1925 and is open to students through the eighth grade. There were 229 kids onstage as it began — and each was a champion many times over, considering that 11 million participated at the school level.

The finalists demonstrated an impressive depth of knowledge as they worked their way through a sometimes diabolical word list chosen by Scripps' 21-person word panel, which includes five past champions.

This year's bee proved that the competition can remain entertaining while delving more deeply into the dictionary — especially early in the finals, when Scripps peppered contestants with short but tough words like "traik" (to fall ill, used in Scotland), "carey" (a small to medium-size sea turtle) and "katuka" (a venomous snake of southeastern Asia).

"There are a lot of hard words in the dictionary," Dev said. "There are realms of the dictionary that the word panelists need to dive into and I think they did a great job of that today."

With the field down to four, Shradha Rachamreddy was eliminated on "orle," a heraldry term that means a number of small charges arranged to form a border within the edge of a field (she went with "orel"). And "kelep" — a Central American stinging ant — ousted Surya Kapu (he said "quelep").

While sometimes Scripps' use of trademarks and geographical names can anger spelling traditionalists who want to see kids demonstrate their mastery of roots and language patterns — and even the exceptions to those patterns — Scripps has made clear that with the exception of words designated as archaic or obsolete, any entry in Merriam-Webster's Unabridged dictionary is fair game.

Dev is happy to be closing that book for now.

"My main priority is sleep. I need to sleep. There have been a lot of sleepless nights these last six months," he said. "I need to sleep well tonight, too. There's a lot more sleep debt."

Zaila Avant-garde walks onto the basketball court with the kind of confidence an NBA player might exude, but the Whitney Houston shirt she sports alludes to the light-hearted nature that follows this 12-year-old girl wherever she goes.

From the moment she walks into the Oakdale Gym, in her hometown of Harvey, Louisiana, Zaila is immediately greeted with hugs and words of congratulations. This hometown celebrity recently brought home a national title.

But not for her beloved sport of basketball.

Zaila is the 2020 Scripps National Spelling Bee Champion, the first African-American girl to win the competition in its 96-year history. The winning word she spelled was murraya, a word that defines a citrus-type flower found in the Pacific.

Taking home this national title, though, was no accident for this quiet, humble pre-teen who would rather spend her days on the basketball court instead of preparing for spelling bees.

“I knew the last word immediately. You can’t strategize your way through all the word,” she explained.

A movie she watched also helped.

“I also watched a lot of Lost In Translation with Bill Murray. So, like, murraya, I always remembered the word as Bill Murray with a, ‘ya,’ on the end,” she added.

In the last two weeks, this 12-year-old student has been on Jimmy Kimmel, made an appearance at the ESPN Awards, and she’s even flown to Manhattan to play strategy games with the staff of the New York Times.

She has logged thousands of miles in the air, and yet, her favorite part of the last few weeks has nothing to do with the notoriety.

“Traveling on the planes that have TVs, I really like that. I’m really into airplane TVs,” Zaila said as she cracked a small smile.

None of this happened by accident. Zaila actually prepared for the Scripps Spelling Bee by prepping with other spellers from previous years.

As for her future plans?

Zaila will turn 13 in a few weeks, meaning her spelling bee days are over. But she’s hoping to someday play basketball at Harvard and has aspirations to work at NASA.

Zaila Avant-garde has already made history as the first African American winner of the 2021 Scripps National Spelling Bee, and now one university is offering her a full ride.

Louisiana State University president William F. Tate IV tweeted Saturday that Avant-garde's academic performance reflected scholarship first and modeled intellectual excellence. He offered her a full scholarship to LSU.

The eighth-grader from Louisiana spelled the word murraya correctly to win the Bee.

Besides her academic success, the Associated Press reported the 14-year-old is a basketball prodigy who holds three Guinness World Records for dribbling multiple balls simultaneously.

Michelle Kaufman at WRTV first reported this story.

KISSIMMEE, Fla. — The lights are up, the stage is set and the championship trophy is standing by, ready to be handed to a new champion of the Scripps National Spelling Bee.

“We're excited to be back all in one room for that championship moment,” said Dr. Michael Durnil, executive director of the Scripps National Spelling Bee.

It’s been a long time coming for this year’s competition.

Last year’s Bee had to be nixed because of the pandemic, marking the first cancelation for the competition since World War II.

This year’s Bee is also in a new location this year: at the ESPN Wide World of Sports, near Disney World in Florida.

“We're usually in Washington, D.C., but because the NBA had success with the bubble here, we found that this would be a great place to be concerned about the safety and security of the spellers,” Dr. Durnil said. “They'll notice that the spellers will be socially distant. They'll be wearing masks. We've taken all the precautions because of the age of the spellers.”

The spellers include 12-year-old Vihaan Sibal from Waco, Texas.

“I was pretty happy because my last year in Nationals, 2018, I didn't even make it past the preliminaries,” Vihaan said. “So, this was a pretty big deal for me.”

It’s also a big deal for 14-year-old Zaila Avant-garde from Harvey, Louisiana, just outside New Orleans.

“It feels wonderful,” Zaila said. “I just feel like the whole time I've been here, I'm just walking around in a dream.”

That dream comes with a few surprises this year, including a visit from First Lady Dr. Jill Biden, who will be in the audience and speak with the spellers and their families before the competition.

The competition will include new rules in the finals, including spellers needing to know a word’s meaning and a potential “spell-off” to ensure there are no ties and only one champion.

“The level of competitors has increased to such a high level that we're leveling up the competition to meet that preparation. Just like in other sports, the rules change over time, so has the Spelling Bee,” Dr. Durnil said. “The drama will be there.”

The Scripps National Spelling Bee starts at 8 p.m. ET on Thursday night. It will be broadcast on ESPN 2, live across all time zones.

ORLANDO, Fla. — There’s a buzz in the air because the Scripps National Spelling Bee is back, and a new champion will be named Thursday night.

Eleven spellers will compete for the title during the finals, which will be hosted in-person at the ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex at Walt Disney World Resort near Orlando, Florida.

You can watch the excitement from home on ESPN2 starting at 8 p.m. ET.

You may notice a few changes to this year’s spelling bee.

The last bee held in 2019 ended with a record eight winners as champions. To prevent a repeat of that, organizers have created some new rules. They’ve added vocabulary questions to the competition and a tie-breaker spell-off.

During the finals, the bee will have the option of activating the spell-off if needed. It would be activated in the closing minutes of the competition if a champion has not yet been declared in a traditional, one-person, one-word round.

Here are the 2021 Scripps National Spelling Bee finalists:

Roy Seligman, 12, from Nassau, The Bahamas
Bhavana Madini, 13, from New York
Sreethan Gajula, 14, from Charlotte, North Carolina
Ashrita Gandhari, 14, from Leesburg, Virginia
Avani Joshi, 13, from Loves Park, Illinois
Zaila Avant-garde, 14, from New Orleans
Vivinsha Veduru, 10, from Fort Worth, Texas
Dhroov Bharatia, 12, from Dallas
Vihaan Sibal, 12, from Waco, Texas
Akshainie Kamma, 13, from Austin, Texas
Chaitra Thummala, 12, from San Francisco

The 2021 Scripps National Spelling Bee champion will receive a $50,000 cash prize, a commemorative medal and the Scripps Cup, a $2,500 cash prize and reference library from the Bee’s dictionary partner Merriam-Webster, as well as $400 of reference works, including a 1768 Encyclopædia Britannica Replica set and a three-year membership to Britannica Online Premium.

This year’s bee will also have a special guest. First lady Jill Biden will attend the finals. Immediately before the event, the White House says Dr. Biden will meet with the spellers and their families to congratulate them on their tremendous academic achievements.

WAXHAW, N.C. — For Sreethan Gajula, playing the clarinet takes practice.

It also takes practice to earn a spot as a finalist in the Scripps National Spelling Bee.

“It's just really humbling,” he said. “I was ecstatic, along with my family.”

Sreethan is now one of the 11 finalists in the Scripps National Spelling Bee.

Canceled last year because of the pandemic, it’s back this year. It is scheduled to take place at the ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex, near Disney World in Florida, on July 8.

“I believe the difference between a good speller and really mastering the art of spelling is their comprehension of language rules,” Sreethan said.

It’s been a whirlwind journey for Sreethan, who will be the first finalist in the bee from North Carolina in decades.

“I've gotten so much support from my community, my teachers, my friends, my school, my county, just from random people all over North Carolina and over the nation,” he said.

He also got a message from one special NFL player for the Carolina Panthers.

“Then Christian McCaffrey, he showed up on the screen,” Sreethan said, “And I was just in utter disbelief and shock. I mean, the best running back in the NFL had just said my name and yeah, I mean, it was so amazing!”

A thousand miles away, near Dallas, Vivinsha Veduru is counting down the days to the bee.

“It feels really exhilarating,” she said. “When I was in third grade and I placed third in the regionals, I got motivated and I started researching and I got this far.”

And far, she’s gone: at 10 years old, Vivinsha is the youngest of the 11 finalists in this year’s spelling bee.

“I know this is my first turn, and whatever I do is a bonus,” she said.

In addition to her hobby of creating her own comic books, there’s been a lot of spelling practice involved.

“My mom helps me by coaching and my dad and my sister also quizzes me, too,” Vivinsha said.

Now, both students, and the nine others who will join them, will put all they’ve learned to the ultimate test, in the hopes of earning that champion trophy.

There are a few changes to this year’s spelling bee.

In 2019, it ended with a record eight winners as champions. To prevent a repeat of that, organizers created some new rules. They’ve added vocabulary questions to the competition and a tie-breaker spell-off.

Do you ever watch the Scripps National Spelling Bee and think maybe you should have paid more attention in English class?

Well, you can expect more of that feeling with the event making a major change.

It will now test competitors on their vocab skills and there will be a lightning speed round if there's a tie at the end.

Spellers will get 90 seconds to knock out as many words as they can correctly.

The change would prevent ties like we've seen in recent years.

We do want to note Newsy is a part of the E.W. Scripps Company, which runs the Scripps National Spelling Bee on a not-for-profit basis.

This story was originally published by Simon Kaufman at Newsy.

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