National Spelling Bee ends in a tie because they ran out of words.

Speechless, because they're out of words.

Really.

The Scripps National Spelling Bee ended in a tie when the final two competitors remaining in the championship round, 14-year old Sriram Hathwar and 13-year old Ansun Sujoe, went toe-to-toe through twelve rounds of words. At that point, Bee officials said they had run out of "championship" words and declared a tie.

Out of words.

WORDS. At a spelling bee.

Here's a hot tip to the good folks at Scripps:

The Oxford English Dictionary has 171,476 words in its twenty volume second edition. Feel free to borrow some polysyllabic wonderfulness. Looking for trickier words? The OED has 47,156 words deemed obsolete. If Sriram and Ansun know how to spell 47,156 obsolete words, they need to be tested for performance enhancing drugs.

Now, you might be a stickler and remark that Scripps uses very difficult words in these spelling bees, especially in the championship round. Scripps uses "championship" words after all. It's the championship!

History suggests otherwise. Over the years, the competition has been won on some fairly common entries. A selection of words that won the bee over the year include:

1925: gladiolus (the flower)
1927: luxuriance
1930: fracas
1932: knack
1933: torsion
1934: deteriorating
1935: intelligible
1936: interning
1937: promiscuous
1938: sanitarium
1939: canonical
1940: therapy
1941: initials
1942: sacrilegious
1948: psychiatry
1956: condominium
1959: catamaran
1967: Chihuahua
1970: croissant
1975: incisor
1976: narcolepsy
1981: sarcophagus
1984: luge
1993: kamikaze

Only in the past decade or so has Scripps decided to enter the realm of "what the--?" words, polysyllabic hot messes that no individual uses in their daily life, ever.

If the National Spelling Bee survived luge in 1984, it could survive lesser words in 2014.



Side note: Ansun wins for best dresser for rocking the red bow tie. The kid's got moxie.



photo Washington Post