Told it was not, he spelled “bathypitotmeter” so quickly that it might as well have been. “This is not the spell-off, right?” Dev asked. “Twenty-five thousand! What? I didn’t know that,” Charlotte said.Įarlier, when the bee was down to Dev and Charlotte, Scripps brought out the buzzer used for its “spell-off” tiebreaker, and Dev was momentarily confused when he stepped to the microphone. When Charlotte returned to the stage later to congratulate Dev again, he reminded her that the runner-up gets $25,000. The winner’s haul is more than $50,000 in cash and prizes. “I’ve known Dev for many years and I know how much work he’s put into this and I’m so, so glad he won.” “I’m so happy for him,” said Charlotte, a 14-year-old from Arlington, Virginia. Runner-up Charlotte Walsh gave Dev a congratulatory hug. “I would say I was confident on the outside but inside I was nervous, especially for my winning word - well, like, before. Then he put his hands over his face as he was declared the winner. “Phile, meaning love, Greek?”ĭev soaked up the moment by asking for the word to be used in a sentence, something he described a day earlier as a stalling tactic. “I think the thing that distinguishes the very best spellers from the ones that end up not really leaving their mark is actually just grit.”ĭev’s winning word was “psammophile,” a layup for a speller of his caliber. “He appreciated that this is a journey, which sounds very trite but is really quite true,” said Dev’s coach, Scott Remer, a former speller and study guide author. And when it was all over, he held the trophy over his head as confetti fell.
He flexed his knowledge in Wednesday’s early rounds by asking questions that proved he knew every relevant detail the bee’s pronouncers and judges had on their computer screens. When he decided to try again, he added an exercise routine to help sharpen his focus and lost about 15 pounds, she said.ĭev got through his region. “It took me four months to get him back on track because he was quite a bit disturbed and he didn’t want to do it,” said Dev’s mother, Nilam Shah. Then came the disaster of last year, when he was forced to compete in the Orlando region because his previous regional sponsor didn’t come back after the pandemic.
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