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

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.

CINQUAIN is somewhat useful in scrabble because QUA and QUAI come up often.

Today is the first time in a month that I didn't get queen bee in before looking at the hints.

seriously, what’s up with repeated letters? four of the letters were present yesterday - and this was also the case for Apr 29 and Apr 30 bees

and the freaking Y again, both yesterday and today.

still annoyed about NACELLE

Otoh a lot of Star Trek nerds have probably been clamoring for NACELLE.

NACELLE annoyed me too, and like a lot of the Spelling Bee esoteric words I'm not sure I'll remember it in the future. I'm slowly learning to remember some though, and can make it to genius every day plus one or two words, without looking at the letter count stats and first-two-letter cues

I'm still amazed by how many four-letter words I miss. I try to focus on them first. They should be the easiest

Yesterday had LOLLOP again.

lol you're goddamn right i got nacelle

I don't give myself more than a half an hour or so to do this. Today there are three seven-letter words starting with G which are obvious on being given descriptive clues from the comments and are words I'm familiar with, but which I probably wouldn't get on my own: GALETTE, GLOTTAL, GAVOTTE.

Carly Simon would like a word with you, Dan S.

today the last words I got, only with the aid of clues in the comments, were NUNCIO and UNDID

sorry, I meant for them to be hidden

lol thanks though, the first was the only one I hadn’t got

may never get over VLOG being an answer the other day

that's just trolling

also trolling: using same 5 letters as we had 2 days ago and 1/3 of the answers also appearing 2 days ago

Like the grudgingly memorized sequence laic laical lilac acai acacia?

yep, and don’t forget iliac

Oh yeah, I'm hip to that one too.

haha

Sigh. Another day with good old laic laical lilac acai acacia iliac

Plus a bonus callaloo

I'm familiar with this from doing the clone at bee.ignoble.dev . If you get four of AEIRST there's around 10 words you always have to make.

I am an old print-centric creature and we used to speak of Etaoin Shrdlu.

Also Matt Fixative and his colleague Ruby Lith.

If you understood any of that, you probably need bifocals

I think today's finally accepts a word for the first that Sam had previously rejected.

Raffia and teff.

Minor victories in a cascade of idiosyncratic wordz

Callaloo is good not bad, I thought I had remembered it was previously rejected which would have been annoying

This is largely a game of plant and food words, afaic

Plants, Italian food, birds, Judaica

unexpected crossover right now, with the may 14 crossword and may 13 bee. 78D.

Wow after having several dalliances with the acacia / acai / iliac group we are back to the equally tedious cacao coca cocoa group.

I have been in love with the English language more or less since birth. It has riches beyond measure. Shakespeare, Milton, the Bible, Jane Austen, the lyrics of Queen.

And yet still I sometimes wake up at 4 AM and perversely occupy my stupid obsessive brain with coming up with yet more shapes of pasta and yet more dumb birds.