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

The comments are helpful when I'm out of steam. I'm just not patient enough to spend all day figuring it out on my own

I've gotten to QB a few times recently with just the letter clues

I've been shocked at how often I miss the simple 4-letter words

Most often I miss words that are just not going to come to mind unless you're north american, which is frustrating. I've just had to put such words in the mental bank, like hockey and baseball slang, american spellings, and use of hispanic words.

Mind you yesterday's had one I don't understand how it could be used. Triton? Thats a moon (thus a proper noun) or a God (ditto) so how come it counted?

Also a type of sea snail.

I had a similar thought a while ago when I guessed morocco, and it was accepted unexpectedly. I looked it up and it turned out to be a type of leather.

Sam's very specific interests remain the game's defining characteristic.

If it's a bird or a pasta, it will be accepted. If it's not a bird or a pasta, odds are about 50/50. Witness today's GNOCCHI but not GNOMIC.

I don’t know or care who this Sam guy is and it’s stupid that this word game thinks words aren’t words

I think that in the beginning, the standard was to exclude words that the creator deemed obscure/offensive/foreign/proper. Too much debate over those squishy subjective categories got tiresome.

Lately I am noticing in online talk about the game that the justification has shifted. It's more like, "We don't want to make people find all 200 of the possible words with this letter set, so we're just looking for a subset that is in accordance with 'our list.'"

Is it arbitrary? Yes it is. Deal with it. Is it capricious? Yes it is. Deal with it. Don't like it? Fine. Go do something else, including the various Spelling Bee clones out there that accept everything in a dictionary. In that regard it's very like the NYT crossword, which has a very specific vocabulary and frame of reference. Narrow but deep.

Me, I like the finite and achievable nature of it. I get almost done, then I go to the grids, then (if still stumped) to the hints. It's a pre-breakfast ritual and once I am done I can get on with my day.

A puzzle that included every possible word would take longer and introduce a tedium that I simply don't need.

FOOFARAW?!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dH7zt12Ok8M

Oops, sorry for not hiding.

Yeah that is one of the ones I don't love but will dutifully fill in, just as a matter of tedious completeness.

This category includes stuff like: foofaraw, lollop, lollard, palapa, callaloo. also the various arbitrarily accepted goofy shit like cancan, ahchoo, moola, and all the aforementioned Judaica / pasta / avian trivia.

Okay today's one getting me to pull eidetic out of my brain was unusually satisfying so all is temporarily forgiven.

I don't think this tops foofaraw but I loathe adverbs like yesterday's PG cornily.

I don't mind that word as it is, like, a normally formed word using English morphemes.

If I have a beef with SB it is goofy nonsense shit like pitapat ratatat cancan foofaraw moola. But I am largely inured to that now. Lately I am just gently annoyed by the bird/pasta nexus, and I just sokve it as a puzzle where the parameters are known and I try to work within them.

Those are all dictionary words that have been around for like a century without falling out of usage, it would be dumb to exclude them

I mean it’s dumb to exclude any words but what would even be the rationale behind pretending cancan was obscure? A no dances rule?

I hear you wins, but compare cancan (which some sources list as two words, others as hyphenated, others as a compound) with packrat (which some sources list as two words, others as hyphenated, others as a compound).

My point is (as ever, throughout the life of this thread and my engagement with the game) is that it is arbitrary and capricious. If another person were in charge of the word list it would still be arbitrary and capricious.

And yet we are still allowed to gripe about the specific arbitraryness and capriciousness of the extant word list.

O ffs here we go again with doodad and wallaroo but not doodoo or dorkwad

awkward…

Literally the first word I saw, but you need an O

lots of great words in today’s bee

It was a fun one to be sure. As of the predawn hour in which I usually do the Bee, the official Times forum hints had the count wrong - 68 words. It is actually 69 and there is one more LE- than the official grid. Correct on the Shunn site.

Anyway it was a good bee, with my only quibble the inclusion of GALANGA while excluding GALENA

Ok I have to admit wordiply, the graun’s attempt to get in on the word game craze, is pretty good and benefits from apparently having a properly inclusive word list. They seem to get around the (nonexistent) issue of “obscure” words by having a main list of common words and counting everything outside of that as a rare word - so eg today I entered a 12 letter word & it said “longest word found!” but I also got a 14 & a 15 letter word, so at the end it tells you “your guess was *longer* than the longest common word you fucking clever clogs” which also supplies the flattery over unremarkable achievements that seems to be a key element of all of these

Another way it shows up the nyt dorks: the first day I played it the starter word was HER, you better believe my first guess was MOTHERFUCKERS and of course it was accepted

this sounds promising

Spelling Bee Assistant is borked, for which I'll blame it for missing QB (although the last two words I had overlooked were TINT and TINTING of all things).

what is the spelling bee assistant??

I manage to make it on my own to genius most days, but queen bee is still elusive without help

SBA is a Chrome extension that shows you how many words you've gotten for certain categories (words by length, words by first letter, words by first two letters), or at least it did before it broke.

tired of the Y and all the various -y words

lotta repetition in this game over time

true in any such game tho

over time you will memorize sequences like ACACIA ACAI etc. or COCCOON COCOA COCA CACAO, VEIL VILE EVIL LIVE

The changing center letters keep it at least a little interesting, and once you get the easy stuff out of the way there is usually that lasts few words that elude you. Today it was WILDWOOD

granted (and i’m tired of the fucking açaí also)
but Y itself works as a suffix which makes it tedious to go through Y-ing everything
and since march 24th we had Y in half of the bees including a stretch of 4 of them in a row

and still no S

seems very stubborn when they have no problem with LY or ING or ED

made worse by the presence of L so now you have to both -Y and -LY everything

ugh

It's still fun for me despite occasional annoyance.

The most recent OMG WHY inclusion for me was HIRAGANA. Given the number of perfectly recognizable English words that get excluded, how on earth is that word deemed non-obscure?

that was one of the 2 i missed

but we just had the fucking Y with L in the center 3 days ago
it’s these repetitions that turn it into a slog

smdh at yesterday's A5, Sam's inclusion of which is weird especially when compared to other cromulent words that aren't accepted (and I also can never remember how he wants it spelled).

lol that was the other of the 2 i missed

Level, you mean AARGH but no ARGH?

* Leee not Level

Yes to the first word, but the words that aren't included aren't specific to yesterday's set (I was thinking tuatara, for example).

Lol my wife has started doing this and we usually collab at the end of the night, it's pretty ridiculous as far as real English words that are not allowed ("hipping" was one recent one, but I know there have been a few even better examples, like some science-y words) vs the arbitrary non-English ones that are.

So far I've learned that they love Italian words (and some Indian, and obviously some Japanese) but hate Spanish.

not all of it though, just some arbitrarily chosen words

For Spanish, I know that NADA is accepted (granted it's pretty well assimilated into English now) but IIRC maybe HOLA too?

HOLA is not accepted: https://www.nytbee.com/Bee_20230305.html

After months of not really playing and generally being bored with this, I started it again recently. How is ALLUVIAL not a word? It's definitely a word. I learned it in geography class!

It is a word! Sam just thinks it's obscure, probably.

lol i emailed sam about this very word right before checking the thread

Yesterday's CI word is pretty outrageous.

Today is a slog.