OXON HILL, Md. Fifteen months ago, Dev Shah spent a miserable five hours spelling outdoor in icy, 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.
Dev said the word depondent is the right word. I just didn't know if I wanted to keep on thinking about it. Soft-spoken, but brimming with confidence, Dev 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, competed first at the national bee in 2019, then had his spelling career disrupted. 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.
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. But when it was all over, he had the trophy on his head as confetti fell on him.
psammophile, a layup for a speller of his caliber, was Dev's winning word.
Dev soaked up the moment by asking for the word in a sentence, something he described a day earlier as a stalling tactic. As he was declared winner, he put his hands over his face.
I would say I was confident on the outside but inside I was nervous, especially for my winning word, well, like, before. He said it was not during, or during, the election.
In the past 24 years, Dev has been the 22nd champion with a South Asian heritage. Deval, a software engineer from India, moved to the United States from India 29 years ago to pursue his master's degree in electrical engineering. Neil Dev, the older brother of Dev, is a rising junior at Yale.
Deval said his son showed an incredible recall with words beginning at age three, 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.
I'm so happy for him, Charlotte said, 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 received more than $50,000 in cash and prizes. When Charlotte returned to the stage today, he explained that the runner-up gets $25,000.
What is twenty-five thousand? I didn t know that, Charlotte said.
The honey bee was started in 1925 and is available to students up to the eighth grade. There were 229 kids onstage as it began - and each was a champion many times over, considering 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-sized sea turtle and katuka a venomous snake of southeastern Asia. 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.