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

ITT we will:
- Crow about your QBs.
- Carp about perfectly cromulent words that are not accepted.
- Curse Sam for thinking that "heptane" is a common word.

No ses or ers need apply.

Also is using https://www.shunn.net/bee/latest considered cheating.

Two pangrams today, and I've only been able to find one...

And Spelling Bee helped me with Learned League yesterday!

Pineal (as in the gland, which Descartes believed was the seat of the soul) missing from yesterday’s bee

yet “peen” is included 🤔

i tried pineal, too! i know it from the movie From Beyond where stimulating the gland causes you to...see into other dimensions and turn into an insane monster? i'm fuzzy on the details

Note to self: DITTOheads are IDIOTs.

I don't have a NYT games subscription so I've been doing https://bee.ignoble.dev instead.

thank you for sharing that! it doesn't work on my laptop for some reason, but it will be a great diversion for times when I just have my phone

I finally gave in and got a 1-year NYT Games subscription last week, and have enjoyed doing the crossword and spelling bee each day

It didn't let me type into the game, either, so I think it just doesn't support physical keyboards.

got 1 point from genius in today's puzzle then got completely stumped. brutal

Yeah, the letters weren't very fun, I just managed to reach genius but mostly gave up thereafter.

Trying to hit 400 points today (QB almost certainly out of reach), but I've probably topped out at 67/392.

What is QB? I got to 349 points and 59 words and stopped. I like these ones where you can find a lot of words

QB = queen bee = you find every possible word

thanks

I love this game

I usually stop a few words after genius but I got QB a few times the past week. Yesterday was too much like work tho.

embolize should have been included as a word in today's puzzle

The other day “unceded” was not on the word list, which surprised me as it’s a word I hear or read almost daily here in British Columbia. But perhaps it’s too uncommon in the US.

Other missing words from recent puzzles
Tuatara
Annatto

I’ve never made it to queen bee. Closest I’ve come is the other day when I was only missing tomtit.

I’ve played this game every so often since it started but just in the past few weeks have I gotten more obsessive about it.

I admittedly don't want to shell out for a Games sub so I just play until it stops me, which usually takes about a minute lol

does anyone else have words that evade your grasp no matter how many times they show up in a puzzle, even though it's a word you're already familiar with? e.g. i appear to be totally incapable of entering MELEE in any puzzle that has M, E and L in it

I'm sure I have loads, but the one I can currently think of is DITTO, hence the mnemonic I posted upthread.

feign and deign a couple of days ago were impossible for me

got a few semi-obscure words today but couldn’t get lantana

he's that guy who does the youtube record review, right?

Pretty easy QB today which was a relief after yesterday although not accepting wiggity is wack.

Yes, got to QB for the first time

the hardest word for me today was a common four-letter word, I just couldn’t think of it

I was surprised they accepted wiggy

got QB today too ^_^

came upon wight just by accident, don’t think I’ve ever heard it used in a sentence except on Game of Thrones

Sigh, add THIGH to the list of common words I always overlook (and which was the one word I missed yesterday).

Loanwords beef: NADA is a frequent answer (and I think that we've seen FINITO before), but not HOLA (meanwhile, ALOHA is accepted).

I agree with you, but it is worth noting that ALOHA is an enormously common word of a US colony, whereas HOLA is...well, not.

Well, Hawaii is a state, but then what about NADA and FINITO? We borrowed those straight from Spanish, and furthermore, HOLA is extremely common in several American states too.

Yeah, I mean, I agree. I was just thinking about possible reasons!

Another note: ALOHA, NADA, and FINITO are all valid words in Scrabble. HOLA is not.

the pangram hasn't usually been the hardest word for me to get, but today it was

i have a whole ran abt this ill prob unleash itt but compound word pangrams (like today’s) are super annoying and unsatisfying

I think I've found at least one other compound word pangram made of two 4-letter words in the last couple of weeks, but can't think of what it was at the moment. I liked expanding plane to biplane, and also discovering the suffix -ize to expand demon to demonize and demonized

xps

I think there is some validity to the argument that NADA and maybe even FINITO are words that an American English speaker might use as slang, without feeling like they are borrowing a word from Spanish. HOLA might be just as likely as those to be used by an English speaker, but I think said speaker would be more likely to feel like they are using a Spanish word for effect. It is admittedly a slim distinction but I think I can grasp their rationale. Not sure where ALOHA fits into that - it seems to be sort of in the middle of that scale, with the caveat that a lot of Americans might use it without even being able to identify it as being from another language (thinking it's just Hawaiian slang).

it feels slightly diminishing to even think along these lines and it’s a failing of the game imo. not saying i know how to fix it. the crossword has worked out a way to include proper names, foreign words, slang mottos like BALLISLIFE and more while also maintaining a famously rigorous clue style that allows for very precise solving. it’s hard to discern a personality behind spelling bee. its dead ends don’t describe the outline of anything in particular. “is it american” is one of the least interesting things i can imagine a puzzle forcing me to think about.

i agree with all that, i guess that's why I don't think Spelling Bee is really in the same ballpark as crosswords

The itch that SB scratches that the crossword doesn't is that iterative variation thing where you're going through -ED or -ING words. I don't need a personality from it (though complaining about the omissions/inclusions is now part of the appeal, not to mention the culture), and the anagramming itself is extremely fulfilling -- and if I'm being pretentious (and wrong), it makes me feel like I'm Nabokov.

I will say, though, that after some days that are a slog, and seeing my score at 0 with the new day's letters feels like an endless ratrace.

As always with any puzzle or game of this nature the gatekeeping around what is omitted is where it falls down

It should wear this role as lightly as possible given the frankly nonsensical words it does allow through

I think that it is getting the mix badly wrong myself tbh

for the most part when the puzzle doesn't accept a word I'm content to move on. agree with Leee about the anagram aspect of it being fulfilling

same but how is FIEF not acceptable i ask you

the lack of footprints to trace back good days and bad is not a feature it's a bug

fief was accepted! I was surprised by that

the purple (hardest) group I'm most proud of having gotten is:

mild, livid, mix, dill

yesterday's bubble, globe, marble and pearl seemed obvious in the end

Today's Spelling Bee was quite something! looking at the letter choices you would initially think there weren't very many words, but it turned out there were 64 of them, including 5 pangrams!

sent sam links to 4 nyt articles that used CYCLONIC, he should let them know it’s not a real word

I was looking up a word on the M-W site and they have a live-ish list of top word searches and they were ALL from today's Connections.

Maybe everyone knows about this but i recently discovered puzzgrid.com which is now my go-to timewasting activity. It's inspired by the Only Connect version of Connections, meaning there's a time limit and you can guess the categories. Here are two of the grids I made.
https://puzzgrid.com/grid/86204
https://puzzgrid.com/grid/86648

Okay is it okay to just note the rather tiresome acai/acacia and coca/cacao/cocoa sequences?

(apologies if that is a spoiler for anyone)

https://i.imgur.com/c7Msy8Z.jpg

that thing that happens where you compulsively enter a word that you know isn’t an actual accepted word but you do it anyway because it’s the only thing you can see at that moment

Today’s: OOMPALOOMPA

...GTFO.

I know it's been said a billion times but their cherrypicking of what does and does not count as a legit word is such complete + total BS.

i tried two old tech ones: palmpilot and popmail

I have been doing these for the last few weeks while on holidays - have got to g-zone on every one so far (a few took extreme mental grind for me) - but this one has fuct me, I don’t see myself even making “amazing” at this point

And yes would love to have a word with whoever decides that panini is okay but arancini is no good (etc etc)

His name is Sam, and (as has been discussed) it's entirely his idiosyncratic preferences that shape the game.

The game is to guess what he allows and doesn't allow. It isn't the full set of English words, or Scrabble-allowed words. It's just him and his quirks. If you or I curated the game it would probably be just as idiosyncratic, just in different ways.

If you don't feel like doing that, go play a different game.

There are clones that use a broader word set, but you don't get the same aspect of communing with the NYT games ecosystem and having running statistics, and commiserating with a million other wretchedly addicted dorkwads like me.

I guess it's part of the charm. "Tooltip" was one I was cursing him for yesterday.

NYT Spelling Bee After Dark

Sam Ezersky, for it is he, is even more frustrating when he’s creating crosswords so I’m glad that spelling bee keeps him busy enough

tried ROBOCOP and BRITPOP yesterday but i guess sam is no fan of either

The first word I saw when I opened this game today was alchemical, and I thought that was pretty good, and I was disappointed.

same!

Thirded. And I usually try to get QB with hints but after one too many "IDK what this thing is" clues I just gave up.

big words today

No RHYTHMICITY :/

Or THICC

no BOLLOCK or COCKBLOCK : /

I feel if The Bear can win all the Golden Globes we can at least have a COOKBRO

okay not accepting MONOACID is ridiculous even by sam’s standards

The other day we were mad that it didn't take CETACEA

and i guess NONACIDIC is such an obscure word too. not
sam must’ve failed chemistry since he hates it so much

Ah, the daily ritual of Bee annoyance, what Sam will and won't include.

I love the smell of grievance in the morning

Allow me to grouse about a word that is not accepted today: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/placable

Last night's real words that were not accepted: BARDO and DOBRO.

accepting INEFFABLE but not EFFABLE is LAFFABLE

came here to post the same sentiment. i mean it’s one thing to cherry pick what’s accepted and what’s not, but this is pretty ridiculous

(i haven’t finished the bee yet but opened the spoilers because i knew exactly which words you meant lol)

Just out of devil's advocacy, have you really ever said, or written, EFFABLE?

Or, like, vincible, couth, plussed, sheveled?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unpaired_word#In_English

sam is a force of nature and we mere humans can attempt to rationalize his decision making but the point of this game is precisely the lack of any rhyme or reason when it comes to what’s accepted and what’s not

ppl love knowing the name of the dude who randomly deleted some words from the list of words

Scanner darkly, I have said before that if anyone else curated the list, the list would be just as arbitrary (just in a different way). What is obscure, what is obscene, what is a variant spelling.

Sam is okay with pipit, pippin, tallit, cabala, and dildo. He likes the acacia and acai combo, plus cacao cocoa coca.

The game is not (and has never been) "every word." Even Scrabble isn't "every word"; it's "every word in the official dictionary," which may mean the US Scrabble dictionary or SOWPODS or whatever.

it’s not arbitrary at all, it’s a character study of sam ezersky in chiaroscuro

^ best use of "chiaroscuro" in ilx history; thanking u

i doff my cap sir

anyway that's why i like the paper one, because there is a word list, but (as i have probably bored you with already on this thread) you are actively encouraged to count other words not on the list if you deem them acceptable (by whatever your own criteria are), so actually every paper spelling bee becomes a character study of YOU!

Gutted that I tapped out at Amazing on Friday. Ended my 26 day Genius run. On my birthday, even!

did sam forget to turn in his homework or

wha happen

my app refuses to update with wednesday’s

ok sam is just plain trolling us with that pangram at this point, right

My thoughts exactly.

Trolling through the tulgey wood

Pangram was good but they should have accepted ummagumma