bee\u2019s website<\/a> has a tool to find your local channel after inputting your ZIP code.<\/p>\nThe New York Times will begin live coverage at 6 p.m. Eastern time on Thursday.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s executive director, Corrie Loeffler, called a \u201cvibe shift,\u201d adding more of a game-show feel to the proceedings.<\/p>\n
This year\u2019s bee will be produced by Michael Davies, who revamped \u201cJeopardy!\u201d and brought \u201cWho Wants to Be a Millionaire\u201d to the United States from Britain. The host will be Mina Kimes, an NFL analyst for ESPN and a recent winner of \u201cCelebrity Jeopardy! All Stars.\u201d<\/p>\n
This year\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
The competition has become more difficult over the last few years, as organizers added rules to bedevil the spellers who exhaust the bee\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Last year, Faizan Zaki<\/a> won the title after finishing as runner-up in 2024. His winning word was \u201c\u00e9claircissement,\u201d which Merriam-Webster defines as \u201ca clearing up of something obscure.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Scripps National Spelling Bee, the 101-year-old competition that tests students\u2019 ability to spell some of the most…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":247301,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[52592,96653,96655,96652,96654,9,11,10,65019,65017],"class_list":["post-247300","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-davies","tag-kimes","tag-merriam-webster-inc","tag-michael-1966","tag-mina","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-headlines","tag-new-york-news","tag-scripps-national-spelling-bee","tag-spelling"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247300","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=247300"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247300\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/247301"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=247300"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=247300"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=247300"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}