The world's premier spelling bee ended Thursday in the U.S.for a second year in a row after an in-tense lo-round showdown between two young competitors to deal with some of the English language's most obscure words. Vanya }hlvaShankar,13,and Gokul Venkatachalam,14,together raised the gold trophy in the 88th Scripps National Spelling Bee. Shivashankar,the sister of 2009 champion Kavya Shivashankar,initially gathered confidence as she went easily through such words as cytopoiesis,bouquetiere and thamakau.Venkatachalam,a basketball fan,also managed such tongue-twisters as poblacion,caudillismo and nixtamal. But as their eight fellow finalists failed one by one,the tension grew until they stood alone on stage* When Shivashankar,in the fourteenth round,correctly spelled scherenschnitte,the Germanderived word for artistic paper cutting, official bee pronouncer Jacques Bailly, broke the news to. Venkatachalam . contest,Bailly said,was about to run out of words,and if Venkatachalam spelled his next word correctly,he and his rival would be declared joint winnersa repeat of last year's surprise. The winning word came so easily to the eighth-grader from the branch St.Louis,Missouri suburb of Chesterfield that he skipped the bee contestant's routine of asking for the word's origin,meaning and usage in a sentence*"Nunatak,"the devoted LeBron James fan said,spelling the Inuit-derived word for an icy island as easily as if he was spelling d. -g or c-a-t. Asked afterwards what went through his mind upon hearing the word,Venkatachalam frankly replied:"Me and Vanya are going to be champions." It can be inferred from the passage that
.last year's spelling bee also ended in a tie .Kavya Shivashankar was last year's champion .the spelling bee is held every two years .the pronouncer decides the contest result