For the second year in a row, the Scripps National Spelling Bee ended in a tie on Thursday as 13-year-old Vanya Shivashankar and 14-year-old Gokul Venkatachalam were crowned co-champions of the competition, USA Today reported.

The two spellers, who hail from Olathe, Kansas, and Chesterfield, Missouri, respectively, went head to head for 10 rounds until the list of 25 championship words was exhausted. Both are eighth-graders, which means 2015 was the last year they were eligible to participate in the tournament, the Guardian detailed.

Vanya's terms included "thamakau" (a traditional watercraft of Fiji), "hippocrepiform" (meaning "shaped like a horseshoe") and "scherenschnitte" (the art of paper cutting design). Gokul spelled words including "sprachgefühl" (the intuitive feeling for the natural idiom of a language), "pipsissewa" (a flowering plant) and "pyrrhuloxia" (a songbird).

The two contestants stood out among the more than 11 million spellers aged 9-15 who participated in regional bees; 283 of them had advanced to the national event, which kicked off on Tuesday in Washington.

"Everything takes hard work and passion," Vanya said about her achievement. "That's definitely what I put in, and I know Gokul put that into this endeavor as well," the gracious co-champion added.

Vanya, who acts and plays the tuba and piano, is the sister of Kavya Shivashankar, who won the bee in 2009; the elder sibling is now a sophomore at Columbia University in New York.

Gokul, a LeBron James fan who said he planned to watch the NBA finals after the event, had "a gruff onstage demeanor, asking about the word's roots and definition before chugging through the letters as if he had dinner plans," the Guardian reported.

"Me and Vanya were going to be the champions," were his thoughts when he heard the final word, the youngster said. "I wasn't nervous."

Thursday's second tie in a row for the spelling event's finals, meanwhile, stunned bee historians; before last year, the competition had crowned a sole champion for 52 years, according to the Guardian.