OTTAWA

Emma Brownlie didn't have to go far to win Canada's spelling bee. The Grade 8 Ottawa public school student outlasted 10 other spellers in a gruelling elimination round Saturday, just across the bridge in Gatineau, Que., to win the CanWest CanSpell national spelling competition.

With the grand auditorium of the Museum of Civilization transformed into a television studio, the finalists started spelling a series of words with a degree of difficulty that quickly went from bad to worse -- or, in Emma's case, from "scurrilous" through "troglodytic" to "molybdenum."

In between, spellers fell quickly as the difficulty mounted. In the end, Brownlie and Calgary's two-time representative Cody Wang battled it out over a series of seven rounds until Wang misspelled "croesus."

That left Brownlie to ruminate over "hamadryad." In her gentle, methodical way she asked pronouncer, Dr. Jacques Bailly, a series of allowed questions about the word's definition (Greek mythological beings that live in trees), origin, its use in a sentence and a repeat of its pronunciation before carefully spelling it, correctly.

The wild applause that followed seemed to startle the slight, reserved girl whose calm demeanour throughout the competition stood in contrast to many of her more animated rivals.

Thunder Bay's Logan Turner took his turn on stage to quietly congratulate Brownlie before heading back to the hotel in anticipation of last night's two-hour broadcast of the entire event on Global Television. Their next challenge is to help to defend Canada's spelling honour along with all 20 of their rivals here, at the Scripps international spelling bee in Washington, D.C., next month.

Brownlie studied for her regional bee with a computer program created by her father and verbal drills by her mother, both of whom jumped on stage with her brother Nicholas to hug Emma when she was declared the winner.

Thunder Bay and Northwestern Ontario spellers and schools get ready: The Chronicle-Journal is already planning next year's regional bee.