Bruhat Soma: Ninety Seconds, Twenty-Nine Words
The 96th Scripps National Spelling Bee ran out of time before it ran out of spellers. Two twelve-year-olds were still standing on the stage at the Gaylord National Resort in National Harbor, Maryland, on the night of 30 May 2024, and the rules required a shootout: ninety seconds, spell as many words as the officials can fire at you. Bruhat Soma of Tampa, Florida, spelled twenty-nine of thirty correctly — a spell-off record. Faizan Zaki of Texas managed twenty of twenty-five. When it was over, Soma described the experience in the flat, honest register of a seventh grader who had just achieved a stated goal: "I'm still shaking."
Third Time
Soma was a seventh grader at Turner/Bartels K-8 School in the Tampa area, sponsored at the national bee by the Rays Baseball Foundation and the Rowdies Soccer Fund — the professional baseball and soccer clubs of the Tampa Bay region, which underwrite local spellers' passage to Washington.
Crucially, 2024 was his third national appearance, and the first two had gone nowhere in particular. In 2022 he tied for 163rd. In 2023 he tied for 74th. Those are respectable placings among the couple of hundred children who reach nationals, and they are also, in the brutal arithmetic of the bee, invisible. The gap between 74th and first is not one of degree; it is the difference between a good vocabulary and something that has been engineered.
"It's been my goal for this past year to win, and I've been working really hard," Soma said afterwards, "so I just put a lot of time into spelling."
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The 2024 bee ran from 28 to 30 May and drew 245 spellers — from the United States and its territories, and from Canada, Ghana and the Bahamas — through preliminary, quarterfinal, semifinal and final rounds, broadcast on the ION and Bounce networks. Soma spelled 29 of the 30 words put to him across the competition's decisive stages. His winning word was *abseil*: to descend a vertical rock face on a rope.
Corrie Loeffler, the bee's executive director, said of the two finalists that they "showed up tonight ready to take down the dictionary."
Breaking the Record
The spell-off format is recent — introduced to guarantee a single champion after the notorious 2019 bee ended in an eight-way tie — and Soma's performance set its new benchmark. The previous record belonged to Harini Logan, who won the 2022 title by spelling 22 words correctly out of 26 attempted. Soma beat it by seven.
What makes that number striking is the mechanics. A spell-off contestant has roughly three seconds per word, with no time to request a definition, a language of origin, or alternate pronunciations — the three lifelines that structure normal bee spelling and let a competitor reason a word out from its roots. In a spell-off, reasoning is largely unavailable. It is pure retrieval.
The Prize Table
The haul was substantial for a twelve-year-old: $50,000 in cash from Scripps, a commemorative medal and the Scripps Cup; $2,500 and a reference library from Merriam-Webster; a $400 package of reference works from Encyclopædia Britannica; a $350 package from SugarBee Apple; and $1,000 in Scholastic Dollars to be donated to his school. He returned to the Tampa area to a public welcome, the second local student in two years to bring home the title.
Why Bruhat Is Called a Genius
This is a case where the honest answer requires resisting the word rather than reaching for it. What Soma demonstrated is not general intelligence and is not, in any meaningful sense, creative. It is an extraordinarily well-built retrieval system: a memorised body of orthography — tens of thousands of words, plus the language-of-origin patterns that govern how Greek, Latin, French, German and Japanese loanwords behave in English — accessible under roughly three seconds of pressure, on live television, at twelve years old. That is a real and rare cognitive achievement, and it is specifically an achievement of encoding, indexing and retrieval speed, not of reasoning.
It should also be said plainly what produced it. Soma's own account is not about being gifted; it is about labour. He had failed to place twice, set winning as an explicit goal for a year, and "put a lot of time into spelling." Competitive spelling at the national level is now a semi-professional pursuit with coaches, word lists organised by etymological root, and thousands of hours of drilling — much of it, in the American bee's demographic reality, sustained by families who treat it as a serious investment. The spell-off in particular rewards drilled automaticity over deduction, because the clock removes the time in which deduction happens.
No one who has looked closely at the bee claims its champions are the smartest children in the country. They are the ones who have built the deepest and fastest lexical index, through a method that works and that anyone with sufficient time, coaching and stamina could in principle follow. That is worth admiring for what it is: a demonstration of what disciplined memory can be made to do. Calling it genius flatters the label more than it flatters Bruhat Soma.
After the Cup
Spelling bee champions age out immediately — the competition is closed to anyone past eighth grade — which makes the title one of the few sporting honours that is definitionally terminal. Soma won it at twelve, on his third and effectively final realistic attempt, with a performance that reset the record for a format designed to prevent exactly the kind of stalemate he was called on to break. Whatever he does next, the ninety seconds in National Harbor are on the permanent record: twenty-nine words, one miss, one dictionary duly taken down.
