Live Updates: Scripps National Spelling Bee Will Crown a New Champion

In their best performances to date, Tarini Nandakumar, an eighth-grade student from Round Rock, Texas, came in ninth place in 2023; and Logan Edwards, a home-schooled student from Greer, S.C., also in the eighth grade, tied for 22nd in this week’s Spelling Bee.

Both Logan and Tarini said they put serious time into reviewing the practice lists of words provided by Scripps, which included all of the 4,500 potential words that the contestants could face in the first three rounds of the competition.

Logan consulted the Merriam-Webster dictionary for words that he didn’t know, and then asked his father to quiz him.

Tarini reviewed words with her mother and her brother, Pranav Nandakumar, who first competed at Scripps in 2018 as a seventh-grade student and has moonlighted as a spelling coach while studying engineering at Texas A&M University.

Expect the unexpected.

Her mother, Vanathi Senthurkani, said that at the beginning of Tarini’s spelling career in the fifth grade, she studied ancient Greek and Latin, and then went through all of the romance languages “to understand the pattern and the rules.”

Hoping to carry her brother’s legacy of spelling greatness (he came in 19th at Scripps in 2018), she devoted about five hours a day to bee study.

When Tarini, 13, encountered a word she didn’t know during the competition, she asked for language of origin, which she said helped her “piece together the word.”

Logan, who spent a couple of hours on word study each day, said that, sometimes, it just came down to instinct.

In a recent regional spelling bee where he secured a place at Scripps, he was asked to spell brume. The definition, mist or fog, didn’t help.

“It’s a homonym, and I hadn’t encountered it before,” he said.

“There was just one spelling that sounded more appealing to me than others,” he said.

Bee week is quite the bash.

Tarini said the week is jam-packed with activities for the contestants.

Compared to 2021, when Tarini made her first appearance at Scripps as a 10-year-old, this time felt “less nerve-racking.”

“I’m a little more confident,” she said. Tarini made it to the fifth round this week, finishing in 46th place.

Logan said he planned to avail himself of the writing classes and other activities offered during bee week, like the session called, “Englishing the World: How the Renaissance Shaped the First English Dictionary.” Last year, he left Washington tied for 173rd on the Scripps stage, and with a toy robot he built in one of the activities that competition organizers have designed to help contestants relax between rounds of spelling.

Win or lose, competitive spelling has its own rewards, said Logan, whose other interests include World War II history, particularly battles fought in North Africa.

“I’ll use words in a sentence, and watch everybody have no clue what I’m saying,” he said.

Sasha Kenlon, a sixth-grade student in Park City, Utah, and a Scripps newcomer who tied for 192nd place, said preparing for the bee was its own reward. From one of the practice lists, she learned the word agathokakological, meaning composed of good and evil, which she said describes her two cats, Twig and Loki, pretty well.

Tarini, who also studies classical Indian dance and singing, advised Scripps newcomers not to stress.

“No matter what happens, you made it to nationals, which is a really big accomplishment, and that’s all that matters,” she said.