The 2026 Scripps National Spelling Bee Starts Its Finals Tonight — Here's Everything You Need to Know

Tonight, in the grand auditorium of DAR Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C., a group of children will stand at a microphone, alone under bright stage lights, and be asked to spell words that most adults have never encountered.

Words like éclaircissement — the word that won last year's competition for 13-year-old Faizan Zaki of Allen, Texas, a word meaning "the clearing up of something obscure." Words excavated from the deepest strata of English, borrowed from languages the spellers have almost certainly never spoken, assembled from etymological roots that most professional linguists would pause to consider.

The children will not pause. They will ask for the language of origin, the definition, a sentence, any alternate pronunciations. They will stand in silence for three to ten seconds. And then, in a moment that is either triumph or heartbreak, they will spell — correctly or incorrectly — a word in front of a national television audience.

This is the 2026 Scripps National Spelling Bee. It is the 98th edition of one of the oldest and most American competitions in existence. Its finals air tonight and Thursday on ION Television at 8/7c, from its brand-new home at DAR Constitution Hall, blocks from the White House. And it is, for anyone who has ever sat with a child at a kitchen table going through vocabulary cards, or stood in a school gymnasium hoping for the best, one of the most human things on television.

What Is the Scripps National Spelling Bee?

The Scripps National Spelling Bee is a nonprofit educational competition that has been running since 1925, when the Louisville Courier-Journal invited other newspapers to host spelling bees and send their champions to Washington, D.C. In its first century, it has become the premier English-language spelling competition in the world.

This year's edition is the 98th — the competition was canceled from 1943 to 1945 because of World War II and again in 2020 because of COVID-19. This year's champion will be the 111th, because the competition has ended in ties multiple times in its history, including a dramatic eight-way tie in 2019 that resulted in eight co-champions.

The 2026 field: 247 spellers from all 50 states, the District of Columbia, three U.S. territories (Puerto Rico, U.S. Virgin Islands, Northern Mariana Islands), and five countries: The Bahamas, Canada, Ghana, Nigeria, and the United Arab Emirates.

How the competition works:

• The multi-day event begins with preliminary rounds, in which all spellers compete

• A written spelling and vocabulary test follows, used to cut the field to approximately 95 quarterfinalists

• Quarterfinals, semifinals, and finals follow, with approximately a dozen spellers advancing to the televised finals

• When two spellers remain, Scripps has the option to use a spell-off — a lightning round tiebreaker — to determine a champion

• The 2022 champion, Harini Logan, won via spell-off in one of the most dramatic finales in the competition's history

Prizes: The champion receives a custom trophy, $52,500 in cash prizes, a commemorative medal, and reference subscriptions from Merriam-Webster and Encyclopaedia Britannica. All finalists receive at least $2,000.

New Venue: DAR Constitution Hall, Washington, D.C.

For years, the Scripps National Spelling Bee was held at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center in National Harbor, Maryland — a suburban conference venue that served the competition well but lacked the historic resonance of a D.C. setting.

For 2026, the Bee returns to the nation's capital: DAR Constitution Hall, located at 18th and D Streets NW in Washington, D.C., a few blocks from the White House. The hall, operated by the Daughters of the American Revolution, is one of Washington's most historic performance venues — built in 1929 and capable of seating approximately 3,500 people.

Hosting the bee at Constitution Hall during Memorial Day week, with the National Memorial Day Parade having just processed down Constitution Avenue, gives this year's competition an unusually vivid patriotic setting. The children spelling words derived from Latin, Greek, French, Arabic, and Sanskrit roots — in a hall named for the document that defines American citizenship — is a particular kind of American moment.

New Host: Mina Kimes

Another significant change for 2026: the introduction of a new television host, Mina Kimes.

Kimes is an ESPN NFL analyst — one of the network's most respected voices on football — and, somewhat unexpectedly for this assignment, the recent champion of Celebrity Jeopardy!. Her combination of sports broadcasting experience and demonstrated quiz competition victory makes her an unusual but entirely appropriate host for an event that is part competition, part television entertainment, and part national tradition.

The previous pronouncer, Jacques Bailly, has been a fixture of the bee for years — but Kimes' energy as a host (rather than a pronouncer) is expected to bring a different dynamic to the broadcast. Whether spelling bee traditionalists warm to the new presentation or prefer the more austere classic format will be one of the unofficial subplots of tonight's telecast.

The Top Contenders: Who to Watch Tonight

Based on performance through the preliminary and quarterfinal rounds, here are the spellers most likely to be standing at the microphone when the championship is decided.

Sarv Dharavane — Dunwoody, Georgia

The top returning finisher from 2025, Sarv Dharavane is a 12-year-old (sixth-grader) from Dunwoody, Georgia, who finished third last year as an 11-year-old fifth-grader. He achieved a perfect score on the 2026 written test — a critical signal, since the written vocabulary and spelling test has become increasingly predictive of final performance as the competition has evolved.

Dharavane is young enough to have two additional years of eligibility after this competition — meaning even if he doesn't win in 2026, he will return in 2027 and potentially 2028 as an increasingly experienced contender. But he is here to win, not to develop future eligibility.

The fact that he posted a perfect written test score suggests his preparation encompasses not just difficult spelling but also deep vocabulary knowledge — the increasingly important "Word Power" component that has come to shape modern bee strategy.

Shrey Parikh — Rancho Cucamonga, California

A 14-year-old eighth-grader from Rancho Cucamonga, California, Shrey Parikh finished third in 2024 and has spent the intervening two years building perhaps the most impressive circuit bee résumé of any 2026 competitor.

In the 12 months before the 2026 national competition, Parikh won:

• The South Asian Spelling Bee

• The SpellPundit National Spelling Bee

• The Words of Wisdom Spelling Bee

Three major circuit victories in a single season is extraordinary. The South Asian Spelling Bee, in particular, is widely considered the most competitive circuit competition in the country — its field draws from the same pool of dedicated spellers who dominate the Scripps bee, and winning it is a significant predictor of national performance.

Parikh also achieved a perfect score on the 2026 written test, making him and Dharavane the two most statistically likely finalists heading into the televised rounds.

Faizan Zaki — What the 2025 Champion Means for Context

Last year's champion, Faizan Zaki of Allen, Texas, was a 13-year-old seventh-grader who correctly spelled éclaircissement — a French-derived word meaning "the clearing up of something obscure" — to win in the 11th round. His competitor, Saarvadnya Kadam of Visalia, California, had misspelled Uaupes (a South American river) in the 10th round to set up Faizan's championship moment.

Faizan was competing in the bee for the fourth time. His story — four attempts, persistence through near-misses, ending with a championship — is the kind of narrative arc the spelling bee produces better than almost any other competition. Whether any 2026 competitor carries a similar story into the finals tonight remains to be seen.

The Indian-American Dominance: What It Means and Why It's Happening

The most statistically remarkable fact about the modern Scripps National Spelling Bee is this: 30 of the past 36 champions have been of Indian heritage.

That is not a coincidence, and it is not a stereotype — it is the result of a specific cultural practice that the South Asian-American community, particularly of Indian heritage, has built around academic competition in general and spelling specifically.

The North South Foundation — a nonprofit that runs regional spelling bees specifically for South Asian-American children — and organizations like SpellPundit have created a pipeline of structured preparation that mirrors the intensive coaching programs applied to music, chess, and other competitive disciplines in communities that prioritize those pursuits.

The children who win these competitions are not doing so because of any inherited linguistic gift. They are doing so because their families and communities have decided that rigorous preparation for academic competitions is a priority, and have built the cultural and organizational infrastructure to support that preparation. The result is a community that has sent, year after year, some of its best-prepared competitors to a national stage and watched them win.

This pattern should prompt a broader conversation about what preparation and community investment look like in competitive academic settings — not about who "deserves" to win, but about what systems produce excellence and who has access to them. The 2019 eight-way tie — in which all eight co-champions were of South Asian heritage — was a crystallizing moment, generating nationwide conversation about representation, preparation, and what the bee's results say about educational culture in America.

The Words: How Hard Is It, Really?

To appreciate what the finalists tonight will accomplish, you need to understand the difficulty level of the words at the championship tier.

Past championship and near-championship words include:

• Marocain (a dress fabric; 1997 championship word)

• Guerdon (a reward; 2014 championship word)

• Nunatak (an isolated peak of rock projecting above a surface of inland ice; 2016)

• Feldenkrais (relating to a system of exercise; 2017)

• Koinonia (a Christian fellowship or communion; 2018)

• Pendeloque (a pear-shaped gem; 2019 co-championship)

• Murraya (a genus of tropical Asiatic trees; 2021)

• moorhen (a waterbird; 2022 spell-off word)

• psammophile (an organism that thrives in sandy soil; 2023)

• lahar (a mudflow of volcanic material; 2024 alternate championship round)

• éclaircissement (the clearing up of something obscure; 2025 champion)

These words come from botanical Latin, Greek medical terminology, French legal language, Arabic scientific roots, and dozens of other etymological lineages. The finals-level spellers do not merely memorize word lists — they understand the etymology deeply enough to construct likely spellings for words they may never have encountered before, using root patterns they have internalized through years of study.

At the championship level, the bee tests not just memory but linguistic pattern recognition at an almost musical level: the ability to hear a word and construct its spelling from the structural logic of its origin language.

How to Watch the 2026 Scripps National Spelling Bee Finals

The finals air in a two-night special event:

• Tonight (Wednesday, May 27): ION Television, 8/7c

• Thursday, May 28: ION Television, 8/7c

The preliminary and quarterfinal rounds aired on Scripps Sports. The semifinals and championship rounds — the ones that matter for the national audience — are on ION.

Streaming options: ION is available on major cable and satellite providers. For cord-cutters, ION is available on several free streaming platforms including Peacock (NBC Universal) and the ION app. Check your local listings for channel numbers.

If you miss the live broadcast: Highlights, viral moment clips, and championship coverage will be widely available on YouTube, ESPN digital, and Scripps' own social channels within hours of broadcast.

The spelling bee has always produced its best content in the moments of individual drama: the long pause before a correct answer, the visible heartbreak of a wrong letter, the eruption when a champion spells the final word and the judges ring the bell. Those moments are why the competition has sustained audience attention for a century.

Tonight, in DAR Constitution Hall, some of them will happen again.

The 101-Year American Tradition

The first Scripps National Spelling Bee was held in 1925. The Louisville Courier-Journal sent a champion to Washington. Eight other newspapers did the same. Nine children competed. The winner, Frank Neuhauser of Louisville, correctly spelled gladiolus — a flowering plant — and received a $500 prize.

In 1925, a $500 prize for spelling gladiolus was the equivalent of a scholarship. In 2026, the $52,500 prize for spelling whatever championship word tonight's competition produces is still transformative for the families involved.

What has not changed in 101 years is the fundamental dignity of the competition: a child, alone at a microphone, doing their best with the preparation they brought and the word they are given. There are no teammates to save you. There is no coach to call time-out. There is just you, the microphone, and the word.

In an era when most competition is mediated, quantified, and algorithmically scored, the Scripps National Spelling Bee remains, in its essential structure, exactly what it was in 1925.

A child. A word. A bell.

Tonight, at Constitution Hall, Sarv Dharavane and Shrey Parikh and 245 other children who have spent years preparing for this moment will compete to become the 111th Scripps National Spelling Bee champion.

Watch at 8/7c on ION. You will not regret it.

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