275 spellers participated in this year's competition, representing the United States, American Samoa, the Bahamas, Canada, China,[1][2]
Two championship finalists from 2010 returned to participate in this Bee; Joanna Ye of Pennsylvania[3] and Laura Newcombe of Ontario, Canada.[4]
This year was the seventh time the champion has come from Pennsylvania.
This was the fourth year in a row than an Indian-American won the competition.
During the last rounds of the final five spellers, 20 words were spelled correctly. This is the equivalent of 4 full competition rounds with no incorrectly spelled words.
This year, the Bee also lasted approximately 3 full hours, 1.5 hours more than the originally scheduled length.[citation needed]
Laura Newcombe, of Toronto, Ontario, was the runner-up. She was eliminated by the word sorites as "psorites".[8]
Joanna Ye, of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and Arvind Mahankali, of Forest Hills, New York, tied for third place. Ye was eliminated by the word galoubet as "galubey",[9] while Mahankali misspelled jugendstil as "uguntschtiel". Mahankali made a joke when he got "Jugendstil" as his word, asking for the word to be repeated, and he said "You could steal?" as the word he got, jugendstil, was very similar to that phrase.[10]
Dakota Jones, of Las Vegas, Nevada, placed fifth; he was eliminated by the word zanja, spelling it as "zangha".[11]
