KANSAS CITY, Mo. — A few changes have been added to the Scripps National Spelling Bee this year - vocabulary and a speed-round - in hopes of naming a single champion.
The 96-year-old bee has included vocabulary on written tests, but never in the high-stakes oral competition rounds, where one mistake eliminates a speller.
The only previous tiebreaker to determine a single champion was a short-lived extra written test that never turned out to be needed.
Both additions are a departure from what many say is the core appeal of the bee: watching schoolchildren who have a mastery of roots and language patterns spell the trickiest words in the dictionary, even if they've never heard them before.
The 2020 bee was canceled because of the pandemic, the first time since World War II that the bee wasn't on the calendar.
This year's event will be mostly virtual, and the in-person finals on July 8 have been moved from the bee's longtime home in the Washington area to an ESPN campus in Florida.
The bee had co-champions from 2014-16, and the 2019 bee ended in an eight-way tie.
In the lightning round, spellers would have 90 seconds to spell as many words as they can correctly. The rapid-fire tiebreaker would only be used if the bee gets towards the end of its allotted time and can't get to a single winner in the traditional way.
The remaining spellers would get the same words and be isolated from each other.
The official competition schedule will include three live telecasts of virtual rounds in the lead-up to the July 8 in-person finals.
The first round of competition is set for June 12.
The finals, featuring 10-12 spellers, will be broadcast live in primetime on ESPN2.
Spellers from our area competing in the bee will be featured on 41 Action News in the coming weeks.
