Winning the Scripps National Spelling Bee is an impressive academic achievement: Not only do its champions boast frighteningly large vocabularies, but they're all under the age of 15. And on Thursday night, the 2019 National Spelling Bee ended with multiple young contestants earning a victory to add to their résumés, when eight contestants tied for the title — an unprecedented outcome for the event.
The National Spelling Bee named eight co-champions on May 30, at the end of a three-and-a-half-hour final that aired live on TV and ended in a historic eight-way tie. Whittled down from an initial field of 562 contestants, the final eight went for 20 straight rounds of spelling words without any errors.
And it seemed likely enough that the group of 12- to 14-year-olds could keep going indefinitely, to Scripps's surprise. The list of "qualified" words that the organization pulls from is only so long, as competition pronouncer Jacques Bailly announced after the spelling bee's final hit the three-hour mark. The eight remaining contestants were about to burn through it.
"Dr. Bailly just announced we're in uncharted territory," the Scripps Twitter account revealed during the 17th round. "We won't run out of words but may run out of words to challenge our most storied spellers in Bee history." Whoever made it to round 20, Bailly declared on behalf of Scripps, would automatically walk away a winner.
Dr. Bailly just announced we’re in uncharted territory. We won’t run out of words but may run out of words to challenge our most storied spellers in Bee history. At Rd 20, 3 away, all remaining spellers will be named Co-Champions of the Scripps National Spelling Bee. #spellingbee
— Scripps National Spelling Bee (@ScrippsBee) May 31, 2019
The decision appeared to have been made on the fly, as what to do in the face of such fierce competition isn't exactly spelled out (heh) in the National Spelling Bee's rulebook, which states that the competition allows "no more than 25 consecutive rounds of oral spelling involving three or fewer spellers. At the end of a round when it is mathematically impossible for a single champion to emerge within those 25 consecutive rounds, the remaining spellers in the competition will be declared co-champions." But in this case, there seemed to be little reason to keep spelling through round 25; not only was the bee running out of appropriately challenging words, but many more than three spellers remained in the competition.
Scripps has named co-champions in the past, including as recently as 2016, but only two contestants at most have shared the National Spelling Bee trophy in any given year. And the competition has never come so close to a 25th round with so many spellers still gunning for the top spot. Words like "callejón," "omphalopsychite," and "auftaktigkeit" failed to trip up this year's spellers, as Bailly paged through the authoritative Merriam-Webster Unabridged word bank the National Spelling Bee uses as its source, looking for words of the right level of difficulty for the final round.
That's how Rishik Gandhasri (age 13), Erin Howard (14), Saketh Sundar (13), Shruthika Padhy (13), Sohum Sukhatankar (13), Abhijay Kodali (12), Christopher Serrao (12), and Rohan Raja (13) all walked away with a piece of the 2019 title. Each will be awarded the full cash prize of $50,000, promised trips to New York and Los Angeles, and some time on the talk show circuit. Additionally, they'll each get their own trophy, which is good news, as I imagine it's hard to share one between eight people, Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants-style.
As the Scripps National Spelling Bee itself quipped on Twitter following the competition's hard-won end, it was the dictionary that ultimately lost this year's event.
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