The post-pandemic bee is leaner and, in some ways, meaner.
Because of the vocabulary-definition rounds, accomplished spellers can be bounced from the bee without ever misspelling a word. And because there is no alternative path to the bee as there was in the late 2010s, the regional bees that spellers must win to qualify can be incredibly tense, and sometimes shocking. Last year’s national runner-up, Vikram Raju, didn’t make it back in his final year of eligibility.
“It’s sort of hit or miss, the onstage vocab format, and it’s sort of brutal in my opinion,” he said. That word was dactylogram, which ended her 2022 national bee in Round 6. She defined it as signature; the correct answer is fingerprint. Vikram Raju, last year’s runner-up, took eventual champion Harini all the way to a “spell-off” — Scripps’ term for its lightning-round tiebreaker. He looked forward to returning this year as an eighth-grader, the last school year in which spellers are eligible.
Scripps had planned to curtail the wild cards in 2020, making them available only to eighth-graders who had previously competed at nationals. But that bee was canceled because of the pandemic, and in 2021, Scripps got rid of the wild cards altogether.
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