Bruhat Soma Wins the National Spelling Bee After Slow Night Concludes With Sudden Tiebreaker

OXON HILL, Md.—Bruhat Soma insisted he was nervous during the idle hours as he waited to take the Scripps National Spelling Bee stage, and he felt even more pressure to perform given that he hadn’t lost a spelling bee in eight months. He never showed any nerves in front of the microphone, though, and when the bee abruptly went to a lightning-round tiebreaker known as a “spell-off,” he could not have been more comfortable. The 12-year-old seventh-grader from Tampa, Florida, blitzed through 30 words in 90 seconds Thursday night, sounding more like an auctioneer than the best speller in the English language, and judges determined that he spelled 29 of them correctly—nine more than his competitor, Faizan Zaki. As the champion, Bruhat receives a trophy and more than $50,000 in cash and prizes....