Only nine contestants remain in the Scripps National Spelling Bee in Washington, DC, and one of them is Sarv Dharavane of Dunwoody.
This is Dharavane’s second consecutive trip to the bee’s final round. Last year, he came in third, losing to eventual champion Faizan Zaki, who was the runner-up in 2024. In 2024, Dharavane tied for 23rd place.
Joining Dharavane in the finals are two contestants from Texas, three from California, and one each from Washington DC, North Carolina, and New Jersey.
Both Dharavane and Sreeya Lakkimsetti, of Columbia County, breezed through the early rounds of the semi-finals, but the 13-year-old stumbled in the seventh round by misspelling “vancomycin,” a powerful antibiotic. She tied for 30th place.
The eighth round, where the spellers picked the correct definition of a word from three choices, saw five of the 24 remaining contestants fall. Dharavane correctly identified “mutable” as prone or likely to change.
In the ninth round, 15 of the spellers were eliminated on words like “brinjarry,” “uredinium,” and “Phthartolatrae.” The sixth grader, however, seemed confident as he correctly spelled “Origenism,” the theological teaching of Origen of Alexandria.
Of the nine finalists, all but one have participated on the national stage – Aiden Meng (T- 58th in 2025), Oliver Halkett (T-60th in 2024 and T-7th in 2025), Shrey Parikh (T-89th in 2022, 3rd in 2024), Zwe Spacetime (T-10th in 2025), Pshaan Gupta (T-20th in 2025), Kushi Gottimukkala (T-20th in 2025), Avushka Dudala (T-41st in 2025), and newcomer Logan Bailey.
Spacetime’s sister, Zaila Avant-garde, won the bee in 2021, according to Scripps officials.
In the early semi-final rounds, Dharavane, from Peachtree Middle School in Dunwoody, the state’s winner, correctly spelled “vivificate,” to animate or revive, and seventh grader Lakkimsetti, from Stallings Middle School, correctly spelled “jurimetrician,” the application of quantitative methods, probability, and statistics to the study of law.
The contest moved on to a speed word-definition round, where spellers must define a word in less than 30 seconds after being given three options, and another spelling round, which proved to be easy for Dharavane and Lakkimsetti, but not others.
In the first two rounds, Dharavane correctly spelled “heiau,” which is a Hawaiian sacred place, then defined “veracity” as “the quality of conforming to facts, truthfulness, or habitual honesty.”
In the preliminary rounds, Lakkimsetti, 13, correctly spelled “nahcolite,” a naturally occurring mineral form of sodium bicarbonate, and defined “gawker” as a person staring stupidly.
Dharavane, after more than 350 words and 23 rounds (including vocabulary), on March 20 won the 65th Annual Georgia Association of Educators (GAE) State Spelling Bee for the third consecutive year, with Lakkimsetti as the runner-up.
Related story:
• Two Georgia spellers advance to national bee
About 247 spellers have descended from all over the world to compete in the 101st bee. In the spelling test round on May 26, which was not televised, 97 contestants advanced, with 72 eliminated.
After the sixth round, the pool was reduced to 54 spellers. The final rounds took a toll on contestants, as the words became more complex, and the vocabulary words more obscure.
The finals will be broadcast live on ION Television on May 28.
