14-year-old competes in Scripps National Spelling Bee for a 6th time
Akash Vukoti was 2 years old when he entered his first spelling competition, in Ashburn, Va., in 2012. “He was very much into the alphabet and numbers, and had a very photographic memory,” his father, Krishna Vukoti, recalled. “The people there, after seeing him, the kid who was in diapers, they all came onstage, saying, ‘Diaper Kid!’”
Akash, who turned 14 on Monday and lives in San Angelo, Tex., has outgrown the nickname but not his love of words and spelling. This week he will compete, again, in the Scripps National Spelling Bee — the Olympics of spelling tournaments — becoming the only student in the competition’s 98-year history to enter six times.
Students must win their local and regional bees to qualify for the three-day event at National Harbor in Maryland, which starts Tuesday. It resumed fully in-person last year, when another Texan, 14-year-old Harini Logan, won in a rapid-fire spell-off late on the final night. This year the bee will draw 231 students, most from around the United States and a smattering from abroad.
To advance, contestants must spell a word from a 4,000-word list, answer a multiple-choice vocabulary question about a word on that list and spell a word that can appear anywhere in the Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary. This year’s finals will be Thursday night. The winner will receive more than $50,000 in prize money, along with a medal, trophy, and reference materials.
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The bee’s vast, air-conditioned venue, at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center, is darkened except for stage lights beaming down on the spellers. Tension mounts as contestants are eliminated and words become increasingly obscure. Months of memorizing flashcards can be obliterated with one misplaced vowel. Most students who get this far are middle-school age, though contestants cannot be past eighth grade or older than 15; the youngest ones this year are 9.
Akash first qualified for the Bee in 2016, when he was 6. He returned in 2018, 2019, 2021 and 2022. The farthest he got was 42nd place, in 2019, a record he hopes to break. This year is his last chance before he ages out.
“I’m just a person who really likes words,” Akash said by phone last week from his home in Texas. It felt hard to believe he was about to age out of the spelling circuit.
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“Twelve years ago, and now this is it,” he said. “That’s mind-boggling. I mean, I’ve gotten so used to being there every year.”
A home-schooled eighth-grader, Akash has his own YouTube channel and has appeared on “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” NBC’s “Little Big Shots” and “Dancing with the Stars: Juniors.” He reads and writes in Hindi and Telugu, his parents’ native language, but he said the words he finds easiest to spell are those of German origin, as most of them follow a certain set of rules.
“The hardest ones are the Celtic languages — Ireland, Scotland, Wales,” he said. “The languages in those regions have really interesting spelling patterns that aren’t as easy to memorize.”
For example, “clarsach,” a Celtic harp, or “avourneen,” an Irish Gaelic word meaning “sweetheart.” And a word for a traditional Scottish or Irish social gathering that he pronounced “kay-lee” but said, “It is spelled — I kid you not — C-E-I-L-I-D-H.”
Akash does not come from a tradition of spelling stars. “It’s not in our family. We are from India; we don’t have spelling bees. It’s all from Akash,” said his mother, Chandrakala Vukoti. “Everything is a new adventure for us.”
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Relatives in India are “so happy and excited,” though, she said. “They are curiously waiting to see what next Akash is going to do.”
Akash’s sister, Amrita, 15, was one of his earliest coaches, drilling him when she was 4 and he was 2. She joined him at the national competition in 2019. “Seeing him go this far is super neat, and it makes me feel really proud,” she said.
Preparing for the Bee not only gives contestants “a greater appreciation for the language that we speak every day” but also teaches discipline and how to deal with adversity, Akash said. And, at the competition, “You make a lot of friends that you’re going to have for a long time, because they all share with you the love for the English language. It’s great fun to talk about the English language together, to talk about our favorite words.”
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What is Akash’s favorite?
It’s 45 letters long. Allow him to spell it for you:
“P-N-E-U-M-O-N-O-U-L-T-R-A-M-I-C-R-O-S-C-O-P-I-C-S-I-L-I-C-O-V-O-L-C-A-N-O-C-O-N-I-O-S-I-S.”
The word was created in 1935 by the president of the National Puzzlers’ League, to become the longest word in the English language (although the Merriam-Webster website now lists longer ones).
Could Akash please define it?
“The meaning is actually a bit grim,” he said. “It’s a disease you get by inhaling microscopic silica particles.”
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZLGkecydZK%2BZX2d9c3%2BOaWxoa2BkwKS%2ByKmnrGWelsGqu82ao2aroJq5rbXNoGSbnZVif3F%2Bkmg%3D