Nine spellers are headed to the 2026 Scripps National Spelling Bee finals after a semifinals round that began with 54 competitors and tested them with two spelling parts and one vocabulary part. The finalists are Oliver Halkett of Los Angeles, California; Zwe Spacetime of Washington, DC; Kushi Gottimukkala of Charlotte, North Carolina; Avishka Dudala of Dallas, Texas; Aiden Meng of Danville, California; Shrey Parikh of San Bernardino, California; Sarv Dharavane of Tucker, Georgia; Ishaan Gupta of Jersey City, New Jersey; and Logan Bailey of Houston, Texas.
The winner will take home The Scripps Cup, a commemorative medal and $52,500 in cash, a prize that still makes the Bee one of the most-watched academic competitions in the country. This year’s field includes 247 spellers ages 9 to 15, all of whom had to win classroom and regional bees before reaching Washington.
The 101st competition began Tuesday, May 26, at DAR Constitution Hall in Washington, DC, the first time the Bee has been held at the historic 1929 venue built by the Daughters of the American Revolution for its annual convention. The event had been held from 2011 to 2025 at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center in National Harbor, Maryland, but the move this year put the finals on a stage with a different kind of weight and history.
Spellers in the semifinals had 90 seconds to get each word right, and a wrong spelling ended the run when the bell rang. They could ask for the definition, part of speech, use in a sentence, language of origin, alternate pronunciations and a repeat of the word. The vocabulary round, introduced in 2021, gave the Bee a second kind of test, mixing memory and meaning instead of spelling alone.
The night also showed how different this competition has become from the old image of a child standing stiffly at a microphone and reciting letters one by one. One speller used the back of her sign to spell out words. Some typed letters out as if on a keyboard. Others whispered the letters to themselves. The hardest words of the night included lucanidae, mnemosyne, eicosanoid and lacrimale.
The Bee now draws spellers from all 50 states, Washington, DC, and 13 international locations, including Guam, Canada, The Bahamas, Ghana, Nigeria, Puerto Rico, the United Arab Emirates and the U.S. Virgin Islands. An estimated 11 million kids participate in spelling bees in the U.S. each year, and the national contest remains the finish line after months of classroom and regional competition. Mina Kimes, an NFL analyst and the recent victor of Celebrity Jeopardy!, also came to the Bee this year after participating in spelling bees in San Pedro, California, while in elementary school.
The final round will air Thursday, May 28, from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET on ION, with viewing instructions available at spellingbee.com/watch by entering a zip code. That leaves one simple question now answered by the semifinals: the race for the national title belongs to these nine finalists, and one of them will leave Washington with the cup, the medal and the cash.
