$15,000 doesn't seem like enough...

LONDON, Nov. 20 - In the end, the zobo and the ogive could not quite triumph over the qanat and the euripi on Sunday, and thus the contender was birsled - Scottish dialect for scorched or toasted.

It was with such linguistic acrobatics that the eighth World Scrabble Championships came to an end in a north London hotel, when Adam Logan, a 30-year-old mathematician from Canada, scored 465 points to beat Pakorn Nemitrmansuk, a 30-year-old architect from Thailand, with 426 points in the final game of a playoff.

Over four days of triple-letter scores and usages involving q's without u's, like qanat, and qi, it had been a time of abstruse words, canny tactics and high tension for 102 contenders from more than 40 countries from Australia to Zambia, including the United States. It was a time, too, when language divorced itself from meaning in the competition for the $15,000 winner's prize.