By OSWALD T. BROWN
WASHINGTON, D.C., May 4, 2023 — The 2023 Scripps National Spelling Bee will take place the week of Memorial Day 2023 at Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center in National Harbor, Maryland, near Washington, D.C. from May 31 to June 2.
This year, 231 spellers earned their spots as national competitors by advancing thorugh regional spelling bees, competing against students representing all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Guam, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Department of Defense Schools in Europe. Spellers will also represent three countries outside the U.S.: The Bahamas, Canada and Ghana. Spellers will compete in four segments of competition to determine who will take home the Scripps Cup: the Preliminaries, Quarterfinals, Semifinals and Finals. All rounds of competition will be broadcast on ION platforms.
The second round of each segment of competition – the Preliminaries, Quarterfinals, Semifinals and Finals – will be a word meaning round, which will require the speller to orally select the correct multiple choice answer to a vocabulary question read by the pronouncer. This element of the competition, introduced in 2021, is designed to challenge the spellers and further advance the Bee’s focus on word knowledge and literacy.
Historically, the competition ends when a speller spells correctly in a one-person, one-word round and is declared champion. However, the officials can choose to activate a Spell-off to declare a winner as they did in 2022. Each speller remaining in the competition would have 90 seconds to spell as many words as they could from a predetermined Spell-off list of words. After all spellers remaining in the competition had competed in the Spell-off, the speller who spelled the most words correctly would be declared champion.
In a release by The Scripps National Spelling Bee on its website, The Bahamas’ spelling champion, Wes Underwood, a 13-year-old Grade 8 student at Samuel Guy Pinder All Age School in Spanish Wells, is speller No. 210.
As the person responsible for introducing the Scripps National Spelling Bee to The Bahamas in 1998 when I was editor of The Nassau Guardian, I am certainly looking forward to meeting Wes and welcoming the Bahamas’ delegation to Washington, D.C. later this month
Here’s a link to Wes Underwood’s MEET THE SPELLERS information on Scripps website:
https://spellingbee.com/meet-the-spellers?speller_number=210
