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

Xp to scanner darkly - same here. Kept hearing "Genius! Yes!" and got intrigued.

I left a LOT of SB staples on the table yesterday, the most egregious of which were probably CACAO and COCOA.

Feel like there's always a short word in plain sight that I miss, even when I get a couple of pangrams. Yesterday I had DIATOMIC and MACADAMIA but missed AMID.

i had DIATOMIC and missed DIATOM lol

I left a LOT of SB staples on the table yesterday, the most egregious of which were probably CACAO and COCOA.

― Leee Tigre (Leee), Thursday, October 21, 2021 6:13 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

I got BOTH of those and missed COCA. And in the inverse, I got DIATOM and stabbed around at DIATOMIC but somehow missed it??

Also I'm over the MAMA/MOMMA/MAWMAW and the same with PAPA a few weeks ago. Make your plate and go.

having DIATOMIC and DIATOM yesterday but not ADDITIVITY today suggests the spelling bee editor is a physicist with a grudge against mathematicians

And miners! ADIT has been disallowed in several recent puzzles.

I had the hardest time today with two short compound words, daylit and daylily

If you’re frustrated with Spelling Bee, “Two No Touch” is equally obsession-worthy IMO, although because it’s made up of dots not letters, there’s obvs a lot less differentiation between individual puzzles

Two Not Touch is good, I tried it once and it's interesting as a spatial dimension puzzle, but I like finding words

Dan S - those were the two I missed too

Two No Touch/Online Star Battle is crazy habit-forming. I downloaded the app and sneak in a game whenever I have an idle second

Oh I veer between the Bee and Two-No-Touch all day.

I can’t remember which ILXer recommended Two No Touch last month, or in what thread, but I’ve lost literal weeks of my life since then to playing. Not a complaint though!

It was forksclovetoufu iirc??

yeah that was me. Sorry about that! I think it's worth more discussion here.

BTW:

The Twitterverse also likes to tweet at the Wordplay account and, in the early days of the digital game, one particularly incensed solver drove home the point that the word RAFFIA should be accepted, by mailing a package of the palm fiber ribbon to the home of crossword editor Will Shortz, to Mr. Shortz’s complete bewilderment.

Resorting to guessing ILXors (TURRICAN)

urticaria, curia, uriatic = nope

No nutria either, gah

Proud moment on finding the 2nd pangram but now am just throwing letter combos in

couldn't get the 2nd pangram

no NURTURANT either

after the obvious words I always throw in letter combinations

as frustrating as they are I always get further with the low word-count puzzles. still haven't gotten to queen bee though

What surprises me is Mr. Jaq and I never have the exact same words even on the low count puzzles. And when we combine our lists, still no queen bee.

husband usually does better than me but yeah we always seem to have at least one word only one of us got,
and there are usually words both of us didn’t get

you do get better with time (especially once you memorize all the typical clusters that go together)
so i usually get to genius each time and got a QB twice, which for somebody with english as a second language is not too shabby

i do wonder if this will affect my word choice overall and i’ll end up mostly using words with no S and consisting of 7 letters max lol

but yes no nutria wth

looking through what I missed yesterday, having fallen short of genius for the first time in a couple weeks.

Okay, I shouldn't have missed taut, intuit, aura, currant, and intuit. Fair cop, guv. Now for the gripes:

Unitarian? Like, I didn't see that word but would have thought it too much of a proper noun. Tutti? Too foreign unless it's paired with frutti in the ice cream flavor. Inurn? There was no way I was going to come up with inurn.

Sigh. On to today's selection.

INURN was rank nonsense.

i missed taciturn, inurn and circuit
circuit is the one i’m upset about not getting

interesting pangram today..

yeah I loled at the pangram

i knew it wasn't but was really hoping DEATHMETAL would be a companion to that lol

fairly easy QB today

You say that but I needed to use Shunn to get there.

Oh, didn't know about Shunn's site. (I know about Shunn himself because he liked my Spotify playlist of songs that sample Steely Dan.)

I used the NYT's own hint page yesterday to get the last two words. For some reason, I never noticed that that page existed before a couple of days ago!

They only added it recently!

We were 3 short of QB, and all short easy words we found earlier in the week. My brain just stops after I hit genius.

the last word i got before QB was TRULY and it’s truly such obvious misses that make the puzzle interesting

didn’t know about the hints either! i do use nytbee.com to see how many pangrams there are and word counts by length

the hints are new

I would like to see daily stats on which words are found most frequently.

My brain just stops after I hit genius.

― Jaq, Saturday, October 30, 2021

mine too, if I even get there

xxp the link in the app is new but the page has been on the nyt website for quite a while… https://www.nytimes.com/spotlight/spelling-bee-forum

There's a little Easter egg today when you reach Genius.

i missed it - what was it?

maybe i should have ARANCINI for dinner, since the bee won’t take it..

it was a witch's cap on the bee.

ARANCINI was on my mind too, since I just made it for the first time last week. it was a lot of work

maybe that’s why sam hates it, unlike tortoni!

5 pangrams today, holy smokes. i’ve got 4 and i’m sure i’m missing an obvious one

I only got three. condonation and diatonic were beyond me

well the first one quite obviously isn’t a word

Using the hints page "grid" thingy is a literal game-changer btw.

With perseverance you can change "stuck at Amazing" to Genius and even "stuck at Genius" to Queen Bee, just by process of elimination.

For example, I was frustrated when HACKLE wasn't on the list but ultimately figured out that I needed to be looking for a six-letter word starting with HE, which ultimately turned out to be HECKLE. It's a totally different task than just staring at the letters and shuffling them hoping for a miraculous revelation.

I have mixed feelings about this. Previously if I wanted to cheat I'd go to an anagram generator / Scrabble solver, which definitely makes it too easy. The hints page is obviously allowable but I'm not sure I will get the same satisfaction / challenge after using it.

I actually don't look directly at the letter counts, but I do note how many words begin with each letter? It just makes me linger longer on a letter and try to wring a couple more out of it.

in orbit, that makes sense - also lets you know when you're going down the wrong rabbit hole (like today with EN- and UN- and ON- prefixes)

fun and relatively attainable (no extremely obscure words, most four letters) 21 word QB today. i lol’d at the pangram