Nine spellers are heading to the finals of the 2026 Scripps National Spelling Bee after a semifinal round that cut a field of 54 down to the last nine on Wednesday at DAR Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C.
The finalists are Oliver Halkett, Zwe Spacetime, Kushi Gottimukkala, Avishka Dudala, Aiden Meng, Shrey Parikh, Sarv Dharavane, Ishaan Gupta and Logan Bailey. They will return Thursday for the final stage of the 101st competition, where the winner will take home The Scripps Cup, a commemorative medal and $52,500 in cash.
This year’s Bee opened Tuesday, May 26, with 247 spellers ages 9 to 15 from all 50 states, Washington, D.C., three U.S. territories and five other countries. Thirteen international spellers came from Guam, Canada, The Bahamas, Ghana, Nigeria, Puerto Rico, the United Arab Emirates and the U.S. Virgin Islands. The semifinals featured two spelling parts and one vocabulary part, a format that has been part of the competition since 2021.
Spellers get 90 seconds to spell their word correctly, and every round trims the margin for error. The contest moved this year to DAR Constitution Hall for the first time after years at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center in National Harbor, Maryland, where it was held from 2011 to 2025. Scripps says competitors must not have passed the eighth grade and cannot be older than 15.
The Bee is one of the most familiar rituals in American youth competition, drawing from a pipeline of classroom and regional contests that feed into the national stage. An estimated 11 million children take part in spelling bees in the U.S. each year, but only a small number reach Washington. By Thursday night, one of these nine finalists will leave as champion, and the rest will leave with the knowledge that they came within a few correct spellings of the title.
