[4][5][6][7][8] The winner was 14-year-old Karthik Nemmani, an eighth grader from McKinney, Texas, who correctly spelled "koinonia" for the win.

519 spellers qualified for the Bee, and 515 ultimately showed up for the competition (early news reports stated 516 and were later adjusted).

The spellers came from all 50 U.S. states, the District of Columbia, other U.S. territories and Department of Defense schools, and eight other countries, including the Bahamas, Canada, Ghana, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, South Korea, and the United Kingdom; contenders from Italy and the United Kingdom were American citizens living in those countries, and not drawn from the general populations.

The finalists included 16 wild-card entrants and all of the consensus favorites: Shruthika Padhy, Jashun Paluru, Sravanth Malla, Naysa Modi, Sohum Sukhatankar, and Navneeth Murali.

The two finalists were both from the Dallas area; Nemmani was a wild-card entrant under this year's new rules, after losing his county spelling bee to Modi.

[3][16] Due to a new rule change this year, there were over 500 participants in the Bee, a large increase over the previous record of 293 set in 2009.

[2] Under a new rule, "wild card" entries were granted to spellers who won a school-level bee but did not win a regional competition.

That made it unclear how many people would apply when the rule change was announced in December 2017, and Bee officials originally stated that up to 225 RSVBee participants would be allowed.