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

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

don't know how but I got the pangram today, some distant memory of an archaic word

I always have the most trouble with the compound words, got tipoff, but not tiptoe or tiptop

also didn't get potpie

managed to get to genius without the pangram which felt like a real achievement. was v surprised that pfft was accepted

Considerably more palatable today! (Although I know some players don't like the high point total days.)

I got loads really quickly today, easy wins with the IN UN and ING combos

Yep hit QB today (just the last three words with hints - as always, it was the easy obvious words that I had missed!)

there were only two un-s and one in- unless you count inning and union, which I don't, but 19 -ings!

i got QB but it took completely unreasonable amount of time to come up with GIVING/UNGIVING after getting everything else
was a fun one today!

It was voguing that escaped me (wouldnt it be spelt with an e?). I'm still not at QB yet, but I have 132 points so i guess im not far off?

GAH the only 2 i missed were the 2 in Dan's post lol. Of all words to miss.

Today was a bit frustrating for me - got there but it was messy.

Futilibees:

continuo

tiffin

conn

nuncio

Words I didn't get without hints

uncuff

coconut

woops sorry if that spoils -

I missed GOUGING yesterday to fall 1 word short of QB -- that one seems to always elude me.

I was also peeved tiffin was not allowed. And yet finito was. Que?

Course cunt was the first word I tried wannit.

If that worked it would have been in like 9 of the last 15 bees, tbh. That combo of letters has come up a lot.

Nice collection of most commonly used words here: https://nytbee.com/ (scroll down to Haven't I seen these words before?).

"finito" was our last word to reach Genius (which is our victory condition/stopping point), so i'm glad it worked!

the 2 words i was missing yesterday were DEFAT and DEFATTED. fake words

especially since FATTED wasn't accepted!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatted_calf

DEFAT was the last one i got so sure enough i forgot to do DEFATTED

today’s was kind of a slog for me

No tuple, punnet, unpeel and honestly whose nephew is this fraud exactly

“unpeel” redundant, surely just “peel” gets you there

but then if that’s so, what on earth does UNOPEN mean