North Carolina student comes close to winning National Spelling Bee
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- Kushi Gottimukkala of Morrisville finished fourth in the 2026 National Spelling Bee.
- She misspelled the Italian phrase "cora sposa" in Round 15 of finals.
- She received a $10,000 prize and is eligible to compete next year.
North Carolina came close on Thursday night to having the best speller in the nation for the first time since 1970.
Kushi Gottimukkala, 13, of Morrisville, finished in fourth place in the 2026 Scripps National Spelling Bee. Gottimukkala made it into the sixth round of Thursday night’s finals in Washington D.C. before missing the word “cara sposa,” which means dear wife.
“Oh Kushi, what an amazing performance tonight,” Mary Brooks, the head judge said after Gottimukkala was eliminated. “You are an incredible speller, and we will hope to see you back. Great job.”
Gottimukkala, a seventh-grade student at Carnage Middle School in Raleigh, left the stage amid a tremendous round of applause. She’ll get a $10,000 prize for her fourth-place finish after having finished 41st last year.
Shrey Parikh of California beat Ishaan Gupta of New Jersey in a spell-off to win the Spelling Bee.
Masters different spelling words
This year, 247 spellers from across the world, including eight from North Carolina, qualified for the national competition.
Nine rounds of competition had whittled the field down to nine finalists by Thursday night.
Gottimukkala breezed through rounds 10 through 14 on Thursday night’s finals as five other spellers fell.
- In Round 10, she spelled “trypograph,” which is a machine for making copies using a stencil made by placing treated paper over a metal plate having sharp corrugations and writing with a stylus whose pressure causes the corrugations to pierce the paper and form the design.
- In Round 11, she got the vocabulary word “dadinage,” which refers to light and playful banter.
- In Round 12, she spelled “biuret,” which is a white crystalline compound formed by heating a highly soluble crystalline nitrogenous compound that is formed in nature by the decomposition of protein.
- In Round 13, she spelled “cere,” which means to wrap in a cloth smeared or impregnated with melted wax or glutinous matter and formerly used especially as a waterproof or protective material for wrapping a dead body or as a plaster in medicine.
- In Round 14, she spelled “ecanda,” a tropical African vine that yields rubber.
But in Round 15, Gottimukkala spelled the Italian word “cara sposa” as “carra spoza.”
Will she be back at next year’s Bee?
Gottimukkala is eligible to compete one more time next year.
When she’s not spelling, her biography on the Spelling Bee website says Gottimukkala enjoys being part of a team, whether it’s Science Olympiad, MathCounts or her Bollywood dance group. She also likes reading and is particularly interested in history and documentaries.
“She also plays volleyball,” sports personality Mina Kimes, the host of the Spelling Bee said during Thursday night’s television broadcast. “She’s been doing Bollywood dance for eight years she told us. She has many interests outside of spelling, but I expect her to continue to spell at the Bee next year.”
Past North Carolina Bee winners
Only two students from North Carolina have won in the 101 years of the National Spelling Bee. The words have gotten considerably harder since those two victories.
In 1952, Doris Ann Hall of Hudson in Caldwell County won on the word “vignette.”
In 1970, Libby Childress of Mount Airy in Surry County won on the word “croissant.”
The closest a North Carolinian has come to winning in recent years was in 2024 when Ananya Rao Prassanna of Cary finished in third place.
This story was originally published May 28, 2026 at 10:57 PM with the headline "North Carolina student comes close to winning National Spelling Bee."
