Organizers must fix marathon madness that saw 8 co-champs

They were positively flummoxed, bamboozled and discombobulated — all words that would have been child’s play for their young charges to spell.

Now the organizers of the Scripps National Spelling Bee are scrambling to figure out a way to keep Thursday’s debacle — an eight-way tie in an event that dragged on past midnight— from happening again.

A Merriam-Webster editor who was in the room during that historic night in Washington, D.C., suggests the best solution is simply to add more words — difficult ones.

“I was stunned,” Peter Sokolowski told the Daily News on Friday. “No one was prepared for eight spellers who were so spectacularly accurate.”

The lexicographer, tapped to present the awards to the eight winners Friday night, explained that Scripps’ word list is sorted by difficulty level, with the hardest ones saved for the later rounds. This year’s competitors, however, reached that list too quickly.

If the eight eventual champions had already proved they could spell the most difficult words the committee had selected, there was no point in continuing , Sokolowski said.

The record-breaking tie shows Scripps must create a much longer list of words deemed difficult — or better yet, arduous, or onerous.

Pronouncer Jacques Bailly shocked the seemingly exhausted middle-schoolers late Thursday when he told them he had essentially run out of words.

“Champion spellers, we are now in uncharted territory,” he said. “We do have plenty of words remaining on our list. But we will soon run out of words that will possibly challenge you, the most phenomenal collection of super spellers in the history competition.”

It was the first time more than two spellers shared the title – and the logjam came at a price for the organizers. All the winners earned the full $50,000 cash prize and got their names on the trophy.

Sokolowski said the Scripps committee could have gone longer in the afternoon, instead of ending up with 16 finalists who made it to the prime-time event. However, he agreed with the decision to crown all eight kids who just simply couldn’t get anything wrong.

“The Spelling Bee isn’t permanently broken, but they broke it last night,” he said Friday. “It’s like any sport. They’ve broken the four-minute mile.”

Despite the unprecedented tie, the contest has actually become harder in recent years. of this

Some of the winning words in the early decades include: “invulnerable,” from 1932; “promiscuous,” from 1937; “therapy,” from 1940; “psychiatry,” from 1948; and “Chihuahua,” from 1967. Those were considered tricky, but they were words people could recognize.

In contrast, some of the winning words in the past decade include “Feldenkrais,” “gesellschaft” and “scherenschnitte.”

“They’ve gone from the general vocabulary to very specialized, technical words, derived from very unusual languages,” Sokolowski said.

Meanwhile, competitors have been catching up, with intense training regimens, coaches and even specialized software to train spellers.

“These are like Olympic athletes. They are training for years and years,” Sokolowski said.