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The 2022 Scripps National Spelling Bee will take place this week. The preliminaries took place on Tuesday. The quarterfinals will run on Wednesday, June 1st from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. ET. The semifinals follow from 8-10 p.m. ET and the finals will take place on Thursday, June 2nd from 8-10 p.m. ET. All rounds will be aired on ION. There will be a live stream that tracks the action at SpellingBee.com.
The Finals on Thursday will be hosted by LeVar Burton. The 2021 winner was Zaila Avant-Garde who made history as the first Black American and first speller from Louisiana to win the Scripps National Spelling Bee. The 2022 competition saw 234 spellers from across the U.S., the Bahamas, Canada, Germany and Ghana.
The Scripps National Spelling Bee was shaken up in 2021 as they wanted to put more of an emphasis on understanding rather than just reciting spelling from memory. The second round of each level of competition will again feature a word meaning round which will see each speller selecting the answer to a vocab question in multiple-choice format.