It started with inane and ended with Florentine. It was slow-going at first and then turned dramatic as it was clear that spelling, and not memorizing, would win the day.

It lasted almost six hours. Nobody got a break. Everyone skipped lunch. The participants drank a lot of water. One audience member quipped that it wasn't a spelling bee, but "spelling Survivor."

It was the Santa Fe County Spelling Bee, designed to spotlight the best student speller in these parts, held at the Jemez Room of the Santa Fe Community College on Tuesday morning.

And at the end of 12-plus rounds, Carlos Gilbert fifth-grader Reed Kellam took first place by correctly spelling Florentine. Jacob Hunter of Ortiz Middle School, who took first place last year, took second place with meringue. Ulysses Yarbrough of La Mariposa Montessori School took third after nailing dromedary. He also came in third last year.

Those three terms may have seemed easy compared with some of the challenging words thrown at the 40-some contestants earlier in the marathon event: exteroceptor, glockenspiel, voortrekker and barukhzy, for instance.

In fact, when one kid got the word "giraffe" to spell, some in the audience groaned as if he had been tossed a soft one. Still, another boy faltered on "alligator," spelling it with just one "l."

The bee included students in fourth through eighth grades from private and public schools in Santa Fe County. Carol Brickler, a teacher at Turquoise Trail Charter School, served as pronouncer/moderator for the event.

First National Bank of Santa Fe's Sandra Snow, Santa Fe Public Schools literacy coordinator Susan O'Brien and The New Mexican public editor Camille Flores served as judges, ensuring that participants adhered to the strict bee guidelines.

Students, for instance, could start a word over if they felt they were misspelling it, but they could not change any of the letters they had already articulated.

Still, at times it seemed many of the students were acing the art of memorization and not spelling, since students can review a roughly 1,100-word primer of likely words offered by Scripps National Spelling Bee in advance of the competition.

By round 10, just seven contestants were left, but it was hard to shake any of them until Brickler and the judges decided to use words from an unpublished list, meaning it is unlikely the kids reviewed them in advance.

"That's what makes this a spelling contest, and not a memorization contest," Brickler told the remaining seven.

Some weren't happy with the change in rules. "It seems unfair," said one boy.

Another -- Yarbrough -- took it in stride. "I hope I can do well," he said, confident his vocabulary would hold up. "I read a lot of books."

One youth acknowledged before that final round that he had simply memorized most of those 1,100-plus words (an impressive feat in itself). He wasn't one of the last three standing with trophies at the end.

Throughout the event, most of the students displayed confidence as they strode up to the microphone to tackle their word, but a few trudged along uncertainly, as if they were about to face a firing squad. As the contestants thinned out, so did the audience, since most of the ejected contestants didn't stick around to see how their colleagues were faring.

But one sixth-grader, an early ejectee, did stay to the end, paying a compliment to Atalaya Elementary School fourth-grader Bradley Nantz, who was making his spelling bee debut Tuesday.

Nantz held on right up to the next-to-last round, missing out on the spelling of battalion before heading back to his seat, where he was comforted by some caring adults.

"You did great, kid," the sixth-grader told Nantz. "You're only in the fourth grade, and I'm in the sixth grade, and I didn't even make it as far as you."

The three top spellers will move on to compete in The New Mexico Spelling Bee held in Albuquerque in March. From there, they have a shot at competing in the national competition as well.

Contact Robert Nott at 986-3021 or rnott@sfnewmexican.com.