Who is Bruhat Soma, the 2024 Scripps National Spelling Bee champion

Bruhat Soma was just 7 years old when his parents began to notice that he had an unusual knack for memorizing things — words, numbers, entire Sanskrit verses known as slokas found in the Bhagavad Gita.

Bruhat, then in the second grade, didn’t think much of his memory. But when his father enrolled him in several regional math and spelling contests run by the educational nonprofit North South Foundation, he saw what his recall could do when put under the pressure of competition.

Though Bruhat finished first in math in the Tampa-area tournament, he placed eighth in spelling.

Eighth.

“I was so disappointed,” Bruhat, now 12, recalled this week. He was determined to do better, he said, learn more words and actually win.

In the following years, Bruhat tore through regional competitions. He placed in the top-five at the WishWin junior nationals and practiced hundreds of words a week, keeping a running list of words that stumped him — then he would use it to drill until they stuck.

By the time he was crowned the 2024 Scripps National Spelling Bee champion on Thursday, it had been eight months since he had lost a spelling bee.

“I don’t know the entire dictionary,” Bruhat said after his latest win.

Bruhat, a seventh-grader, earned his Scripps victory in a 90-second spell-off with no breaks, no follow-up questions and no time to work out root words or languages of origin.

A spell-off is relatively new to the Scripps bee, having been introduced in 2021 and used just once before. Harini Logan spelled 22 words correctly in 90 seconds to win the 2022 bee.

When the spell-off was announced Thursday after 14 intense rounds of competition, gasps echoed through the packed auditorium at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center in National Harbor, Md. Former spellers who had been eliminated in earlier rounds raised their voices and clapped their hands to a singsong chant of “Spell-off! Spell-off!”

Bruhat went first. His good friend and spelling bee opponent Faizan Zaki, 12, a sixth-grader from Allen, Tex., was ushered off the stage and sequestered while Bruhat stood at a lectern, his arm hovering over a blue buzzer.

He blazed through the list of 30 words, his fingers flying through the air as if typing on invisible keys — a trick, Bruhat said, that he picked up just a few months ago.

Bee officials declared Bruhat’s winning word was abseil, a mountaineering tactic of rappelling by use of a rope looped over a protrusion. In the spell-off, officials count the winning word as the one that gives a speller one more correctly spelled word than their competitor.

Abseil was Bruhat’s 21st correctly spelled word. He would go on to correctly spell eight more — a feat that the bee’s beloved longtime pronouncer and 1980 champion Jacques Bailly described in awe as “really amazing.”

But not everyone was a fan of the national bee being settled via spell-off. Some, like 2023 Spelling Bee champion Dev Shah, also from the Tampa Bay area, felt the lightning round lacked the purity of spelling for which the contest is known.

“As the competition progressed, it was clear that Faizan and Bruhat — our final two spellers — showed up tonight ready to take down the dictionary,” Corrie Loeffler, the executive director of the Scripps National Spelling Bee, said in a statement. “They were a powerful match.”

Both boys were making their third appearance at the national bee. Neither had ever before made it to the final round.

Last year, Bruhat tied for 74th place, according to Scripps officials. In 2022, he tied for 163rd place.

But this time, he held the coveted ceramic Scripps cup over his head and beamed as brightly colored confetti exploded with a bang from the ceiling and the crowd roared. The winner of the bee also receives $50,000 in cash and other prizes.

“I feel ecstatic,” Bruhat said moments later, surrounded by reporters and cameras eager to hear from the new national champion how he had done it.

He explained that he had drilled a spell-off-like scenario with his dad every day for the last six months. He worked on his speed and recall as he raced through lists of 30 words at a time.

“I knew this moment, if I made it this far, would probably come,” Bruhat said. “I wanted to be prepared for it.”

When the moment came, Bruhat said, he felt an unusual calm wash over him.

He had practiced this exact scenario. Bruhat knew he had to trust that he could do it again now — in front of a live audience, on national television.

Then he did.

When his family rushed the stage, his two sisters — ages 8 and 10 — kicking up confetti as they ran, Bruhat held the trophy tight against his slight frame.

It took a moment for everything to sink in, he said later. He had achieved something he’d been dreaming about for years. Now, he would no longer spend school nights and weekends drilling the spelling of medical terminology or Latin roots.

He realized he had room to remember other things. And he knew exactly where he would begin.

“I’m going to remember this moment,” he said, eyes scanning the brightly lit stage, the blue carpet, the heap of confetti still underfoot. “I want to remember everything about it.”