12-year-old takes home Scripps Spelling Bee honors

May 30 (UPI) -- In what was only the competition's second spell-off ever, a 12-year-old seventh grader from Tampa, Fla., has taken top honors Thursday night in the 2024 Scripps National Spelling Bee.

Bruhat Soma claimed the title in dramatic fashion after a high-stakes and nail-biting spell-off with 12-year-old Faizan Zaki of Plano, Texas.

His winning word was "abseil," meaning "a descent in mountaineering by means of a rope looped over a projection above," Scripps said in announcing Soma as the winner.

"I can't describe it," Bruhat said in a television interview on stage as the confetti rained down . "I'm still shaking."

The spell-off requires each contestant to spell as many words correctly as they can in 90 seconds. Faizan Zaki knocked out 20, but Soma reeled off 29, including words such as "heautophany," "nachschläge" and "puszta," the New York Times reported .

"A BEEdazzling effort in our second-ever Spell-off by #Speller47 Bruhat Soma and #Speller207 Faizan Zaki, who correctly spelled 20 words in the Spell-off," Scripps posted on social media .

This was not Soma's first run at the high-profile spelling bee. He tied for 163rd place as a fifth-grader in 2022. The following year, he finished tied for 74th.

This year, while it took a monumental effort and a razor wire finish, he held the trophy over his head as the trademark confetti reigned down on him and Zaki in the middle of the stage. The two shook hands, both looking somewhat mesmerized.

A spelling coach associated with the event, Cole Shafer-Ray , who competed in the event in 2013, 2014 and 2015, said that a "bee that works like it should -- where the best spellers generally win -- hinges on having a read on what makes a word difficult," he said, but he's concerned about how the bee eventually declares a winner in this type of situation.

"This year's competition has probably had the most examples ever of Scripps' word selection reflecting blatant misunderstanding of word difficulty. I think if they ever want to fix this -- which they should -- they need to have former spellers pick the words. Recent ones," he explained to The Times.

Shafer-Ray acknowledged that spell-offs are exciting "but I think it should probably be a last resort, since it's testing an entirely new skill," he continued.