A 13-year-old from Christchurch has won a ticket to represent New Zealand at the Olympics of Spelling in Washington by successfully spelling the word "dissonant".
Tom Winter of Burnside High School beat 11 other contestants to win the New Zealand Vegemite Spelling Bee and the right to represent the country at the 83rd Scripps National Spelling Bee in June.
The manager of the contest, Janet Lucas, says it took 17 gruelling rounds to find the winner.
Tom Winter will spend the next two months studying the Scripps contest word list and reading Webster's Third New International Dictionary.
