Tomtit in the tilth -- the NY TIMES SPELLING BEE thread

it was a witch's cap on the bee.

ARANCINI was on my mind too, since I just made it for the first time last week. it was a lot of work

maybe that’s why sam hates it, unlike tortoni!

5 pangrams today, holy smokes. i’ve got 4 and i’m sure i’m missing an obvious one

I only got three. condonation and diatonic were beyond me

well the first one quite obviously isn’t a word

Using the hints page "grid" thingy is a literal game-changer btw.

With perseverance you can change "stuck at Amazing" to Genius and even "stuck at Genius" to Queen Bee, just by process of elimination.

For example, I was frustrated when HACKLE wasn't on the list but ultimately figured out that I needed to be looking for a six-letter word starting with HE, which ultimately turned out to be HECKLE. It's a totally different task than just staring at the letters and shuffling them hoping for a miraculous revelation.

I have mixed feelings about this. Previously if I wanted to cheat I'd go to an anagram generator / Scrabble solver, which definitely makes it too easy. The hints page is obviously allowable but I'm not sure I will get the same satisfaction / challenge after using it.

I actually don't look directly at the letter counts, but I do note how many words begin with each letter? It just makes me linger longer on a letter and try to wring a couple more out of it.

in orbit, that makes sense - also lets you know when you're going down the wrong rabbit hole (like today with EN- and UN- and ON- prefixes)

fun and relatively attainable (no extremely obscure words, most four letters) 21 word QB today. i lol’d at the pangram

i got everything but the pangram but i did get fairly close with MEGACOCK

lol

I got QB yesterday but spent an embarrassingly long time 1+ points away because I was overlooking COOK.

Yesterday I am having a tough time forgiving lunular. On the margin of acceptable is landau.

Today we have a reasonably charming pangram situation. For me, genius status arrived early at 30 words but that means a long and potentially exasperating 13-word slog if I am to pursue QB.

Hope that we can all get one of Sam's favorite birds today.

Not without this thread

I got most of them, but didn't think of noncom as referring to a non-commissioned officer

in 1950s manhattan everyone would have known what a noncom was therefore it’s valid

which is why WOOT is so upsetting, it exists outside the wes anderson diegesis

i mean there are other reasons too

I QB'd yesterday! NONCOM I got as a guess. I guessed COMMIT too, rhyming it with "comet" and thinking "this is some silly textile arts term"

Thanks also to the thread title for the freebie

both husband and i got genius yesterday and got most words between the two of us except for this very common word: COMMON
facepalm

Omg we got QB tonight! 1st time ever!

i'm two words away and stumped ;_;

QB as well but really because i got lucky just randomly getting DOETH

ha that was my last word as well and i only got it from the grid telling me i needed a DO 5 letter word

the two words i was missing yday where TEETHE and TOOTHED. i had TEETH, TEETHED, TOOTH 🤦

surprised they didn't take DOLDRUM today

same

This got me trying to sign up for a bloody NTY games account, and something went weird. It half-did a transaction, said it errored, didnt take my money, and now I cant try again and they have the WORST "contact us" help links.

i don't know if this will help you Trayce, but if you do try again later and you have a paypal account, you should use that to sign up for any NYT subscriptions rather than your credit card.

NYT deliberately makes it difficult for you to cancel/modify subscriptions by making you call in to customer service - you can circumvent all that bs by just canceling your automatic payments on the paypal site. 

Today leans heavy on food again with CARBONARA, BARBACOA, CORNCOB

Weirdly quiet on the avian front

Thanks Roz, alas I dont have paypal :( i alredy have a NYT sub is the stupid part, and I just cant add a games sub to it. its weird, it sort of half-worked initially and I was able to access the full games site? then the pending charge disappeared and now its locked out again. Gah.

lol’d at today’s pangram. well played, sam!

the site’s been down for me for the last half hour or so

I saw that, it should be back up now.

Also, I'm a little miffed that a Y4 (YEGG) that I learned from SB isn't being accepted today.

That's a hobo/criminal word, very rarely used these days

Last time I read it was my last re-read of Jack Black (not that one).

Today's prominent category of obscure words is... foreign currency! Birds and pasta strangely underrepresented.

I think it's been close to two full weeks since we've last had a bingo (where each of the letters has at least one word that starts with it), which to me and my OCD is kind of distressing.

Hm, I have never really tracked that

I found the schef (adam schefter ha ha)'s government name, to no avail.

discovering the hints has made it easier to get QB (i only look at them after i've hit genius) which i've now gotten like 3-4 times in the last week but it came at the cost of me wasting way more time on this game

the hints feature doesn't work on my partner's phone! nothing at all happens when you click "today's hints." maybe it's for the best.

after genius I usually give up. Today I got friar, but not friary. also of course fray, but not affray and the puzzle didn't accept miliary (which is a common medical term), or milliary, referring to a Roman mile

Dr. C., I also find that the hints page doesn't work from in the app, but it does work from a web browser. Which actually is better because it makes it easier to toggle back and forth.

Ok today's PG is pretty obscure, and I had to cheat to get it.

Agreed. I got it and thought "WTF dude, how can you know that and not know so many other common words?"

I got genius yesterday and today Ive only found six words... is saturday always hard?The crossword was quite hard too.

Also how is pfft a word and not pepito?

NYT's crosswords progress in difficulty, starting on Monday (easiest) to Saturday (hardest). Sunday is longest -- sometimes it's hard, more often it's more gimmicky.

The Bee doesn't seem to adhere to any kind of difficulty progression, meaning that any given day could be really hard -- at least in my experience.

one of the hardest spelling bees ever today