Indian-American Harini Logan won the Scripps National Spelling Bee on Thursday night, claiming victory in a blistering, first-of-its-kind spell-off that capped a marathon duel of one arcane term after another.

Harini, 14, an eighth grader from San Antonio, Texas, beat Vikram Raju, 12, a seventh grader from Denver, Colrado, after she rattled off word after word in a 90-second speed round. Both students spelled so fast that the judges had to go to video to determine a winner: Harini spelled 21 words correctly, compared with 15 for Vikram.

It was a tense victory that came after she was briefly eliminated and then reinstated earlier in the finals, when the judges decided that a definition she had given for the word pullulation was acceptable.

Harini, who was making her fourth and final eligible appearance in the Bee, said winning felt “so surreal”.

“This is just such a dream,” she said, holding the trophy on national television.

Vikram stood nearby with his family, visibly trembling and his head bowed with the high emotions of the three-hour contest.

But when the Bee’s host, LeVar Burton, asked Vikram if he would return to the Bee next year, in what would be his own last eligible year, the boy, shaking but sounding resolute, gave a decisive “yes”.

It was the first time the Bee has used a spell-off since the national contest’s inception, in 1925, and it came after Harini and Vikram took turns spelling a series of words incorrectly, meaning a winner could not be crowned.

Harini managed to spell more words than more than 200 other competitors at the national level, including 12 other finalists. Words in the final rounds included scyllarian, pyrrolidone, Otukian and Senijextee, reflecting how, over nearly a century of national spelling bees, the words have become increasingly esoteric.

But students have kept pace with terms out of botany, medicine, folk art and other specialist realms.

In turn, contest organisers have created new rules in recent years, including a component to test word meaning and the spell-off, a potential “lightning” tie-breaker round.

Those rounds left only Harini and Vikram as the final two spellers on the stage, where 13 finalists had started off the night. They dominated every round until tripping up in the very end, each missing half a dozen words between them.

“The fact that Harini and Vikram are misspelling these words is a testament to how tough these words are,” said Zaila Avant-garde, last year’s winner.

Harini and Vikram “are the absolute best of the best”, she said.

New York Times News Service