Luca Holloway, of Kavanagh College, and Chloe Gray, of Queens' High School, beat other years 9 and 10 pupils at the lower-South Island finals of the New Zealand Spelling Bee yesterday.
They were among a field of 15 - which would have been larger if pupils from Invercargill, Gore and Queenstown were not blocked by snow that morning.
Chloe said the only word she could remember was "empathetic''.
"If you got one wrong the bell rang and you were out, so that pretty much just left us two.''
Luca came second in the national final last year, and hoped to go one further in Wellington in November.
His undoing came from the word "melliferous'', which is a botanical term meaning "yielding or producing honey''.
Event organiser Janet Lucas said 250 pupils from throughout the country were vying to be in the finals.
The words which stumped competitors were often not the most difficult.
"You can get overconfident. It's an easy word if you know it, it's a difficult word if you don't.''
