OXON HILL, Md. (AP) — Fifteen months ago, Dev Shah spent a miserable five hours spelling outdoors in chilly, windy, damp conditions at a supersize regional competition in Orlando, Florida, only to fall short of his dream of returning to the Scripps National Spelling Bee.
“Despondent is the right word,” Dev said. “I just didn’t know if I wanted to keep continuing.”
Look at him now.
Soft-spoken but brimming with confidence, Dev asked precise questions about obscure Greek roots, rushed through his second-to-last word and rolled to the National Spelling Bee title Thursday night.
Dev, a 14-year-old from Largo, Florida, first competed at the national bee in 2019, then had his spelling career interrupted. The 2020 bee was canceled because of COVID-19, and in the mostly virtual 2021 bee, he didn’t make it to the in-person finals.
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. And when it was all over, he held the trophy over his head as confetti fell.
Dev’s winning word was “psammophile,” a layup for a speller of his caliber.
“Psammo meaning sand, Greek?” he asked. “Phile, meaning love, Greek?”
Dev 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. Then he put his hands over his face as he was declared the winner.
“I would say I was confident on the outside but inside I was nervous, especially for my winning word — well, like, before. Not during,” he said.
Dev is the 22nd champion in the past 24 years with South Asian heritage. His father, Deval, a software engineer, immigrated to the United States from India 29 years ago to get his master’s degree in electrical engineering. Dev’s older brother, Neil, is a rising junior at Yale.
Deval said his son showed an incredible recall with words starting at age 3, and Dev spent many years in…
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