Marathon spelling bee finally ends after 95 rounds

It took 95 rounds and a delay of two weeks — when judges ran out of words in February — but a Missouri county finally has its spelling bee champion after the two finalists broke a tie Saturday.

Fifth-grader Sophia Hoffman and seventh-grader Kush Sharma became celebrities after they literally exhausted the Jackson County Spelling Bee of words on February 22. At that competition, they lasted 66 rounds before organizers said they needed time to gather more words.

On Saturday, the pair dueled for another 29 more rounds in a special spell-off held before an overflow crowd  in the Kansas City Public Library. In the end, Sharma prevailed, after Hoffman spelled "stifling" incorrectly, according to the Kansas City Star. Sharma took the win by spelling "definition."

The contestants had no problem correctly spelling words like "boodle" and "slobber," often asking the moderator for a word's origin, definition or part of speech. 

But at the end of the 28th round, Sophia appeared puzzled when attempting to spell "stifling," and even more so when the bell rang to indicate she had gotten it wrong.

The competition ended after Hoffman's parents unsuccessfully appealed to the judges, believing that the pronunciation of "stifling" might have confused her, KCUR reports. The judges reviewed a recording of the proceedings and found nothing amiss.

This meant Kush could claim the title if he correctly spelled his word in the 29th round.

After being given his final word, "definition," Sharma drew chuckles from spectators watching from a different room in the library when he asked for the definition. 

The 13-year-old promptly spelled it correctly and won the bee — earning a spot in the Scripps National Spelling Bee.

Following the 66-round war of words between the middle-schoolers last month, the judges came on Saturday prepared with 230 approved words and 100 back-ups.

"We didn’t want to run out of words this time," event co-chair Mary Olive Thompson told NBC News.

That's the definition of preparedness.

Spelling bee runs out of words for finalists after 66 rounds

A battle between two elementary school students has turned into an old school, bare-knuckled slugfest — only with schoolbooks and bare-boned pronunciations.

The spelling bee competition at the Plaza Branch of the Kansas City Public Library started Saturday morning and, after 66 rounds, hasn't been decided because officials ran out of words.

The standoff between Highland Park fifth grader Sophia Hoffman and Frontier School of Innovation seventh-grader Kush Sharma will resume March 8 at a library location to be determined. The winner gets a ticket to Washington, D.C., in May for the Scripps National Spelling Bee.

The pair matched each other word for word, round after round until —  after almost six hours of "Can you use it in a sentence?" —  officials didn’t want to pull more words from the dictionary in the middle of the bee. They reasoned that one speller might get a really tough word and the other a relatively easy one and it wouldn’t have been fair.

Plus, said bee coordinator Mary Olive Thompson, “about 2 o’clock, I think we were all really tired.”

Twenty-five students started Saturday’s championship event. After 19 rounds, only Hoffman and Sharma were still standing. Last year’s bee ended after 21 rounds.

The two spelling heavyweights better start training because the next round will be tougher. They won’t be working off the Scripps-approved list of 300 words. The words could come from anywhere in the 1,664-page dictionary.

Lightweights — like myself — will stick with Spell Check.