After a more than two-hour spelling slog, eighth-grader Trey Felton of Northumberland Middle School won the Richmond Times-Dispatch’s 47th annual Regional Spelling Bee on Saturday, March 26th.

   Felton, 13, correctly spelled “corollary” to clinch the title, but the victory came only after a hard-fought competition between Felton and the runner-up, Zainab Iqbal, a fifth-grader at Al Madina School of Richmond.

   Four of the six finalists in the competition were eliminated in the first round on Saturday.

   Felton and Iqbal then went an additional 55 rounds, with the advantage swinging back and forth between them numerous times.

   The pair had multiple opportunities to seal the championship, but neither could quite clinch it on words such as “jitney” and “holometabolous.”

   “That was tiring,” Felton said Saturday after the competition, which lasted from 1 to about 3:15 p.m. with just a few five-minute breaks. "That was tiring," Felton said Saturday after the competition, which lasted from 1 to about 3: 15 p. m. with a few five-minute breaks.

Felton is the son of Pastor and Mrs. Willard C. Felton, II of the Shiloh Baptist Church, Burgess, VA .