Indian-origin teenager Shrey Parikh won the 2026 Scripps US National Spelling Bee on Thursday after defeating Ishaan Gupta in a tense lightning-round tiebreaker. The 14-year-old Shrey from Rancho Cucamonga, California, got 32 words right to be crowned the best young speller in the English language, while Ishaan spelled 25 words correctly in the tiebreaker.
The winning word was “bromocriptine,” which is “a polypeptide alkaloid that is a derivative of ergot and mimics the activity of dopamine.”
Shrey will be taking home $52,500 for winning the 2026 Spelling Bee title, which is around Rs 50 lakh Indian rupees.
Shrey had finished third in 2024 but lost his school bee last year when he was battling a fever. He has dominated the bee circuit since, winning several highly competitive online competitions against many of the same kids he outlasted this week in the nation’s capital.
Ishaan, a 12-year-old seventh-grader from Jersey City, New Jersey, was a semifinalist this year, outperformed some veteran spellers in the finals and has another year of eligibility left.
