Many National Spelling Bee contenders pursue mastery. For a few, it's more about memorization

Shrey's approach has proven effective for spellers seeking to hold the trophy, and it was good enough to make him one of 54 kids competing in Wednesday's semifinals and seeking a spot in Thursday's finals. But at least one semifinalist has gone old-school, shunning outside help and using the dictionary as his guide.

Their opposing strategies have revived a long-running if good-natured debate in spelling circles: Which is more important, mastery of languages or rote memorization?

“At the end of finals, most of the words aren’t going to have a really clean-cut language pattern or rule that you can pull from. So I think memorization is really important,” said Sam Evans, who coached each of the past two champions. “Sometimes it gets a bad reputation, but you have to do it.”

Every word is in the dictionary, if you can find it

It’s all but impossible to reach the finals without knowing the components that make up words absorbed into English: roots and languages of origin. But some champions have stood out for their incredible recall, the ability to instantly visualize any word they’ve run across or even recite dictionary definitions verbatim: Nihar Janga in 2016, Zaila Avant-garde in 2021 and Bruhat Soma in 2024.

Sarv Dharavane might be the next of that group.

Sarv finished third in 2025 as a relative unknown in the spelling community. There’s a reason for that. The 12-year-old sixth-grader from Dunwoody, Georgia, has no coach. He doesn’t participate in online bees. And his only study guide is the source for every word in the competition: Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged dictionary.

“The book is my coach,” Sarv said.

And given his past success, he saw no reason to change it up.

“I didn't really change anything because my strategy got me far last year, but I did more of what I did before,” Sarv said.

“I used to read the dictionary and set aside difficult words to study later,” he explained. “I did it a lot, so I got a lot of words and it was really easy just to go through them. I've always been able to remember pretty well, and I can read through long lists without getting tired, so this strategy works pretty well for me.”

Simple, right?

Many spellers think there's a better way.

Master the roots, and you don't need to memorize as much

Dev Shah, the 2023 champion, advocates an artistic approach to spelling — the one also championed by his coach, Scott Remer. Master roots, master language patterns, and learn how to spot the exceptions, and you can spell a word that you’ve never seen or don’t remember.

Shah accepted that he could never memorize the dictionary — “No one can,” he said — and he believed if he got a word he didn't know, he could figure it out.

“The skill of guessing is everything,” he wrote in a Washington Post op-ed after his victory.

In an interview Wednesday, Shah said memorization was important, especially for quirky words with obscure origins. He said the best spellers, including Avant-garde, found a balance between memorization and mastery.

Having a conceptual understanding of how words are spelled can also help spellers perform under pressure when their memory fails them, said Shah, who admitted he finds it daunting to memorize a huge volume of words.

Former champion Sohum Sukhatankar, who coaches Shrey, said spellers need to fill their brains with the most useful information.

“When you’re at the highest level, you have to be prepared for hundreds of thousands of words,” he said. “You want to do as little memorization as possible to avoid the chance that you just forget it, so it’s all about efficiency.”

After a catastrophic school bee, one speller seeks every edge

Shrey knows he might have to guess when he's at the microphone, but he wants to eliminate variables. That makes sense, given that a year ago, he wasn't even the top speller at his school.

“I had a fever at my school bee last year, and I just blanked on the word ‘calipers’ ... and I missed it,” he said. “I was really devastated.”

It took a few months before Shrey was motivated to start studying again. Once he did, he added Sukhatankar to his coaching team. He's learned how to slow down when he's at the microphone because of a bad experience in 2023, when he rushed through a word, didn't enunciate it clearly and judges determined he got it wrong.

He's also a believer in study guides. Shrey said an interactive, AI-assisted platform called Onyma that offers personalized learning and competition with other spellers — launched this month by Sukhatankar and Evans — has helped with his preparation.

He also uses SpellPundit, an online resource created by two former spellers and their parents that made a splash at the 2019 bee when the majority of that year’s eight co-champions used it. The company claims every champion since as a customer.

Shrey won the annual SpellPundit bee, the South Asian Spelling Bee and several other online bees, which he doesn't necessarily see as an advantage.

“I feel like it (creates) more pressure to perform,” he said.

Evans believes spellers who want to win should use their study time efficiently, but there's no barrier to learning every possible word.

“There's a common joke among spellers that says everything's in the dictionary, so it's all ‘on-list,’” he said. “The dictionary is the most basic thing that spellers need to know.”

Ben Nuckols has covered the Scripps National Spelling Bee since 2012. Follow his work here.