Kavya Shivashankar

The Scripps National Spelling Bee is a competition held annually in the Washington, D.C. area in the United States over a two-day period at the end of May or beginning of June. Since 2011 it has been held at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center.

The spelling bee competition began in 1925, and was organized by The Courier-Journal in Louisville, Kentucky, until the Scripps Howard Broadcasting Company assumed sponsorship in 1941. The media conglomerate, now known as the E. W. Scripps Company, has continued to sponsor the competition to this date. The competition was canceled from 1943 to 1945 due to World War II. Every speller in the competition has previously participated in a local spelling bee, usually organized by a local newspaper. Although the competition is titled "National", spellers from Europe, Canada, New Zealand, Guam, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and American Samoa have entered the competition. Only two people from outside the fifty U.S. states have won the competition  – the first from Puerto Rico in 1975 and the second from Jamaica in 1998.

The competition has been televised live in the U.S. since 1994 on ESPN, a Disney-owned cable-television network dedicated to broadcasting and producing sports-related programming. Beginning in 2006, the ABC network, also owned by Disney, broadcast the final rounds during a live two-hour timeslot. In 2011, the final rounds returned to ESPN because of a scheduling conflict with that year's NBA Finals. The competition is primarily an oral competition conducted in elimination rounds until only one speller remains. The first round consists of a 25-word written test, the remaining rounds are oral spelling tests. The competition has been declared a tie six times, in 1950, 1957, 1962, 2014, 2015, and 2016. As of 2016, 47 champions have been girls and 46 have been boys.

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