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

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

ALOHA, HOLA and FINITO all seem fine to me but the other day MAHATMA was the only word i was missing to get queen bee and that annoyed me

it didn't take fief for me!

My mistake, it took it.
But not FIENDING?

I was also annoyed that it didn't take FIENDING

same

Hoo boy, the pangram today...

i was gonna say, this is the first time i got genius and THEN got the pangram

meanwhile we're not taking NONCONJOINING, which is a perfectly common enough term that i have used when booking hotel rooms (i haven't really but let's pretend)

i wasn’t surprised it didn’t take GIGGING

https://bullyusa.com/frog-gigging.html

this species of bird junco and this plural of a word I had already found jinni were the ones I couldn't think of today

same!

there were some words I never would have thought of today Tori, the plural of torus, and tortoni - a dessert featuring frozen sweetened condensed milk, whipped cream, coconut maroon crumbs, slivered almonds and chopped maraschino cherries?

Also torii, the gate of a Shinto shrine, I know what it stands for but haven’t ever seen the word beforelink

EFFABLE isn't accepted today (being the antonym to INEFFABLE, not something cruder), but that just makes me wonder what the threshold is for words to be accepted. I have a strong feeling that it's just what Sam arbitrarily decides (see: that one time COPE wasn't accepted).

here’s the autoreply they send when u email them

Thanks for solving and taking the time to offer us a word suggestion today!

Every Spelling Bee puzzle is hand-curated to focus on relatively common words, with a couple of tough ones here and there to keep it challenging. We occasionally miss words, and always appreciate our solvers letting us know. As a reminder, proper names and words that contain hyphens or apostrophes are not part of our word list.

In fairness to our wide-ranging audience, Spelling Bee generally avoids terms that are hyper-specific to any background or professional field, such as terms that might be familiar to, say, a physician or geologist, but not people outside of that area of expertise. We also do our best to ensure that any inappropriate or offensive terms will be omitted.

We welcome your feedback, and this inbox is monitored to take all relevant and appropriate suggestions into consideration, but we are unable to respond to individual inquiries.

If you have any questions unrelated to a word suggestion, want to share an experience or need assistance with any of our other puzzles, please reach out to us at our Games Care email address: nytga✧✧✧@nyti✧✧✧.c✧✧. You can also follow our editor Sam Ezersky for additional Spelling Bee updates and discussion.

Best,

The New York Times Games Team

So HABOOB and NENE are known to non-specialists. Okay.

:) I like the word haboob!

Yeah the specialist line is nonsense tbf but lookit the fun is in the try

today I was surprised that they didn't accept the word billable, tried it a couple of times to make sure, but let it go

oh wait, they did accept it! sorry

two words I couldn’t get today both ended in double vowels bailee, libelee - which is a future reminder

also surprised the puzzle today also accepted an anatomical word and two related words, one entirely linguistic and the other both anatomical and linguistic

labia, labial, bilabial link

sung to the tune of matchmaker, matchmaker

Okay I give, I subscribed. Questione: How do you know how many possible words there are? Does it tell you when you've found them all?

Yep

Queen bee scote also 2x the "amazing" score which you can click into to see on the app which gives you some idea

i use https://www.nytbee.com/ to check how close i am to QB

My preferred site is https://www.shunn.net/bee/latest.

Two of words I didn't get (I looked already) were SUCH obvious crossword puzzle answers, I forgot both of them pop up ALL the time but no one has literally ever used them in a sentence ime.

pangram today was bullshit imho

My preferred site is https://www.shunn.net/bee/latest.

― Carte Blanchett (Leee), Tuesday, September 14, 2021 1:25 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

too many ads. also a bit too much info

I got the Pangram today and can't remember what it was lol

Agreed, kind of a lackluster set of letters today, even though I'm with a word two of the pangram.

it was the first word I thought of in this puzzle for the first time

I usually start with 4-letter words beginning with the first word in the alphabet. Today most of the words had only 4 letters.

The 5-letters were hard

the 6-letter words also

three of the 5-letter words (starting with kn-) and separately the two 6-letter words were related to each other in spelling

the pangram was a compound word, for the 2nd or 3rd time since I've been doing this puzzle

I missed knoll, which kept me from QB, and as a Cocteaus fan, that kind of stung.

Ooh today's is much meatier.

finding today quite difficult tbh.

I'M SUPPOSED TO FIND 49 WORDS IN THIS MESS HOW???

Im at 46 but its been a hard slog

Second pangram and at 47 i really am tapped out

at least so far there are no crazy words like dugong

Another special occasion today??

haha i was embarrassingly far into it before i registered the S

My subscription ended the other day and I’m reduced to getting my Spelling Bee fix from inferior copies

You must feel like Moses dying just before reading the promised land.

getting an S and then having words like SKUAS become SB fare feels a bit like the monkey’s paw curling

Almost as annoying as when Sam seems a word unsuitable is when he does so with a word that used to be accepted, like today's puzzle which doesn't accept tontine, which I was so proud of myself for remembering.