Scripps National Spelling Bee finals return to Washington with 247 spellers

The Scripps National Spelling Bee returned to Washington with 247 spellers chasing a title that has become as much about preparation as raw memory. The 98th finals were set for Thursday night at DAR Constitution Hall, marking a move back to the capital after years at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center in National Harbor, Maryland.

The competition ran Tuesday through Thursday, with the finals airing Thursday from 8 to 10 p.m. ET on ION and streaming on Scripps-owned platforms and spellingbee.com. The field drew students who advanced through regional bees and represented all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Guam, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Department of Defense Schools in Europe, and five countries outside the United States: the Bahamas, Canada, Ghana, Nigeria and the United Arab Emirates.

For organizers, the event’s scale reflected a system that has been refined over generations since the first Bee in 1925. The competition was canceled during World War II, from 1943 to 1945, and again in 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Vocabulary rounds, introduced in 2021, have added another layer to a contest that can also turn on a spell-off tiebreaker, as Harini Logan showed in 2022 when she won after spelling 22 words correctly.

The coaching story sat at the center of this year’s coverage. Tony Dokoupil reported on one coach’s mission to “make every speller the best speller they can be,” a philosophy that treats championship spelling as a skill built through repetition, correction and composure. The idea has become common in the sport: nearly every champion over the past 15 years has worked with a coach, and Scott Remer has emerged as one of the best known, guiding five national champions and charging up to $180 an hour for private lessons.

The Bee has also kept expanding its support structure off the stage. It marked its 100th anniversary in 2025 and launched Beelieve with the Scripps Howard Fund to help make spelling bees more accessible in schools and communities. Scripps also publishes Words of the Champions, a 4,000-word study list, and curates a Great Words, Great Works book list, turning preparation into a repeatable system rather than a mystery.

That system has produced remarkable results. Thirty of the past 36 champions have been of Indian heritage, including 2025 winner Faizan Zaki, who became the fifth runner-up to come back and win the Bee. This year’s finals again showed why the event endures: excellence in spelling is not treated as a gift, but as something taught, drilled and earned.