Spellers invited to sit on stage during the Finals each received a unique commemorative pin.

Speller #140 Gokul Venkatachalam is from Missouri. This is his 4th year at the Bee.

Speller #90 Vanya Shivashankar is from Kansas. This is her 5th year competing in the Bee; her sister Kavya also won the Bee in 2009.

Vanya Shivashankar and Gokul Venkatachalam were declared co-champions of the 2015 Scripps National Spelling Bee!!

I watched in amazement as these two spellers exhausted a list of 25 extremely difficult championship level words! Gokul spelled the word nunatak for the win. Nunatak is a hill or mountain surrounded by glacial ice. On the road to the championship, Gokul also spelled filicite, Sprachgefuhl, nixtamal, and pipsissewa. Vanya’s winning word was scherenschnitte which is the art of decorative paper cutting. Along the way, Vanya also had to spell zimocca, tantieme, urgrund, and Bruxellosis.

It takes lots of hard work and dedication to just qualify for the National Spelling Bee so I’d like to say congratulations to every single speller who participated this year!