Fiazan Zaki finally won the 2025 Scripps National Spelling Bee competition after last year’s heartbreak.
According to Independent, 13-year-old Faizan from Plano, Texas, on Thursday night won the crown of the Scripps National Spelling Bee after spelling the word “éclaircissement” correctly, which means the clearing up of something obscure.
As he began to spell the last few letters or the final words, his voice began to crack, and after winning the competition, he dropped on the floor of the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Centre in National Harbour, Maryland, with joy.
The executive director of the competition, Corrie Loeffler, said the final faceoff had “about the most exciting ending I’ve ever seen,” The New York Times reported.
Last year Bruhat Soma, from St. Petersburg, Florida, beat Faizan in the second-ever spell-off in the history of the Scripps National Spelling Bee.
Notably, Faizan was the only finalist from the last year who also competed in the 2025 final.
Prize money of the Scripps National Spelling Bee
As per Scripps, the winner of the spelling bee competition, Faizan, would take home $50,000 in cash from Scripps, a $2,500 cash prize and a reference library from Merriam-Webster and $400 worth of reference works from Encyclopædia Britannica.
Scripps National Spelling Bee completed its 100th year of the competition with this year's contest.
Participants from all across the 50 states of the US competed in a four-stage competition that included the preliminaries, quarterfinals, semifinals and finals. Spellers have 90 seconds to correctly spell a word after it has been pronounced.
This year 243 participants from all states, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, the Northern Mariana Islands, the Bahamas, Canada, Germany, Ghana, Kuwait, and Nigeria took part in the competition.
