The Family Weekly: How the Spelling Bee Ended in an Eight-Way Tie

(Joshua Roberts / Reuters)

This Week in Family

This year, the Scripps National Spelling Bee ran out of words to stump its final contestants. After 20 rounds, the judges declared an unprecedented eight-way tie. (Previously, the spelling bee had seen only the occasional two-way tie.) How did these teens outsmart the spelling bee? They intensively trained for this moment by using sophisticated software programs to test their knowledge, and mastered the art of deconstructing words based on their sound, meaning, andand , which were recycled from previous bees—were just too easy this year.