14-year-Old Wins $50,000 On Spelling Bee After Correctly Spelling 'Psammophile'

Credit: YouTube / Scripps National Spelling Bee

A 14-year-old boy who correctly spelled the challenging term "psammophile" won a spelling bee.

Dev Shah, a resident of Largo, Florida, won the spelling bee and received a check for $50,000 (or £40,100).

He displayed his expertise throughout the competition by enquiring about the etymology of the terms he was required to spell out.

Credit: YouTube / Scripps National Spelling Bee

His winning word was "psammophile," which I must admit I had to look up as well.

In short, it means the reverse of what Anakin Skywalker said in Star Wars: Attack of the Clones.

If it wasn't obvious, a "psammophile" is a plant or animal that does well in a sandy habitat.

By separating it into its two Greek roots, Dev was able to get his right guess.

He said: "Psammo meaning sand, Greek? Phile, meaning love, Greek?”

Dev finally requested that the word be put into a sentence.

He had previously stated that this is a sort of delaying strategy to give a rival time to consider how the term is spelled out.

He was named the winner and held the trophy above his head as glitter dropped from the ceiling.

He said: “I would say I was confident on the outside but inside I was nervous, especially for my winning word — well, like, before. Not during."

Deval, Dev's dad, is a software engineer. For his Master's program in electrical engineering, he relocated from India to the United States 29 years ago.

Deval claims to have observed his son's exceptional word memory as early as age three.

Dev has since spent a significant amount of time participating in events organized by the North South Foundation. This nonprofit organization was established to create scholarships for youngsters in India.

Dev enjoyed the task and stated: “There are a lot of hard words in the dictionary. There are realms of the dictionary that the word panelists need to dive into and I think they did a great job of that today.”

There were about 225 competitors on stage at the start of the spelling bee.

Before the competition narrowed down to those fortunate 225, millions of students from schools around the USA entered, giving each of these individuals numerous opportunities to demonstrate their abilities.

Additionally, short words were used as well. In order to divert contestants, there occasionally were brief but evil instances supplied. These terms included "traik," which means to become unwell, and "carey," a species of sea turtle.