The Scripps National Spelling Bee, the 101-year-old competition that tests students’ ability to spell some of the most challenging words in the Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary, will crown a new champion on Thursday night.
Nine of the world’s premier young spellers, all under the age of 15, will vie for the chance to win $50,000 and hoist the Scripps Cup. It’s a fierce race to the pinnacle for the finalists, who advanced from a field of 247 contestants over two days of preliminary spelling and vocabulary rounds.
The finals will air live from 8 p.m. Eastern time to roughly 10 p.m. on ION, which is available on streaming platforms including Peacock, YouTube TV and Tubi. Viewers can also follow on the bee’s website.
The New York Times will begin live coverage at 6 p.m. Eastern time on Thursday.
The competition is being held at DAR Constitution Hall in Washington after more than a decade at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center in nearby National Harbor, Md. Moving locations was among a series of major changes that organizers instituted as part of what the bee’s executive director, Corrie Loeffler, called a “vibe shift,” adding more of a game-show feel to the proceedings.
This year’s bee will be produced by Michael Davies, who revamped “Jeopardy!” and brought “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” to the United States from Britain. The host will be Mina Kimes, an NFL analyst for ESPN and a recent winner of “Celebrity Jeopardy! All Stars.”
This year’s spellers have come from all 50 states and the District of Columbia, Guam, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Defense Department schools in Europe and five countries: the Bahamas, Canada, Ghana, Nigeria and the United Arab Emirates.
The competition has become more difficult over the last few years, as organizers added rules to bedevil the spellers who exhaust the bee’s list of difficult words. Vocabulary rounds, introduced as an onstage event in 2021, require spellers to answer a multiple-choice question about the definition of a word within 30 seconds. Spelling rounds require contestants to provide a complete spelling of a word within 90 seconds.
Officials also have the option of declaring a spell-off in the finals as a way to avoid having multiple champions. In a spell-off, which was used in 2022 and 2024, the remaining spellers have 90 seconds to spell as many words correctly as possible.
Last year, Faizan Zaki won the title after finishing as runner-up in 2024. His winning word was “éclaircissement,” which Merriam-Webster defines as “a clearing up of something obscure.”
Ashley Ahn covers breaking news for The Times from New York.
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