WASHINGTON, DC – The 2023 Scripps National Spelling Bee is set to take place from May 31 to June 2 at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center in National Harbor, Maryland, near Washington, DC

This year, 231 spellers advanced through the regional spelling bees. In addition to spellers from all 50 US states, the competition will also see participants from the District of Columbia, Guam, Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, and Department of Defense Schools in Europe as well as spellers from The Bahamas, Canada and Ghana.

Spellers will compete in four segments of competition to determine who will take home the Scripps Cup: the Preliminaries, Quarterfinals, Semifinals and Finals. All rounds of competition will be broadcast on ION platforms.

The second round of each segment of competition – the Preliminaries, Quarterfinals, Semifinals and Finals – will be a word meaning round, which will require the speller to orally select the correct multiple choice answer to a vocabulary question read by the pronouncer. This element of the competition, introduced in 2021, is designed to challenge the spellers and further advance the Bee’s focus on word knowledge and literacy.

The competition is known to end when a speller spells correctly in a one-person, one-word round and is declared champion. However, the officials can choose to activate a Spell-off to declare a winner as they did in 2022.

Each speller remaining in the competition would have 90 seconds to spell as many words as they could from a predetermined Spell-off list of words. After all spellers remaining in the competition have competed in the Spell-off, the speller who spelled the most words correctly would be declared champion.