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

My rule is that if I get to Genius all by myself, I can go look at the Forum. That's usually good for another several words. Like, if I see there is still an EU- word out there and it's 6 letters, it's pretty easy for me to eventually get to EUNUCH.

If I'm still a word or two away, after working assiduously through the two-letter list and the word-length grid, I call it a day. If I'm very curious I may look at Hive hints or just frickin swallow my pride and go peek at the actual answer from nytbee.com or wherever. But I will not put it into the app, because I didn't earn it.

This regimen has me working - actively or passively - on the Bee from about 5:30 til 6:00, usually finishing at QB or a few words away, while still in bed. Once I get up I do the daily crossword, taking between 5 and 15 minutes depending on the day of the week. If I have down time during the day I will do archived puzzles or Wordle or Absurdle or Sweardle or Lewdle, but mostly I am just waiting for the next morning to start the cycle again.

I was just one word off QB before reaching for the hints today - annoyingly, it was the root of another word I’d found earlier. sometimes you just miss easy ones like that.

Oh yeah, totally.

I really didn't like that HUBBY was an accepted work today.

My organization's subscription level doesn't get me access to the full game, so I have to be content each day with hitting the halfway limit or whatever the cutoff is.

i don’t use hints because i hate sam ezersky and don’t want to give him the pleasure #realtalk

B-b-but then why do the Bee at all?

As predicted I am one word shy of QB. Not sure if I want to go to the hints yet.

Okay, looked at the hints and it’s over. An easy word I just wasn’t seeing.

Was thinking we should have a spoilery thread for such words.

― Tapioca Tumbril (James Redd and the Blecchs), Tuesday, January 25, 2022 12:32 PM (nine hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

i should've made it hidden, my bad

the NYT games subscription is only $40 per year and is totally worth it! I still haven't gotten to queen bee without hints, but today I came close.

I can solve most of the hard sudoku puzzles, but was stymied by the one today. I've also been trying to solve LA Times' impossible sudoku.

The crossword puzzle is fascinating, I'm learning, but the puzzles beyond Monday/Tuesday are mostly beyond me

Thinking maybe I might try to post some of the words I didn’t know at all the next day on this thread.

the NYT games subscription is only $40

What! Its charging me $5 a month via the AppStore! (i could not get it to work via my regular NYT account on the website)

The crossword puzzle is fascinating, I'm learning, but the puzzles beyond Monday/Tuesday are mostly beyond me

I started doing them last year and felt the same way but you'll get the hang of it pretty quickly imo, esp once you get used to the oft-repeated crosswordese.

I do the crossword, spelling bee and wordle all in the 5-6 hours after I finish work and before I go to bed

I must have tried BUBO about 20 times in the Spelling Bee yesterday. I still don't understand where their word list comes from.

Sam W., if you go to nytbee.com, you can see both the answers and a tidy list of dictionary words that weren't included. Sometimes it helps to see the kind of thing Sam E. might have considered and rejected as "obscure."

beebee
bene
benne
benny
bobby
bobo
boney
bonne
boubou
boyo
bubbe
bubby
bubo
bubu
bunn
hebe
nobby
unbe
yobbo
yobby

Some are Briticisms, like boyo, or Frenchy stuff that doesn't quite rise to the level of a properly integrated loanword, like bonne. Some might be considered potentially offensive, like hebe.

I get that it's fun for some folks to just plain hate on Ezersky for what he includes vs. excludes; I continue to think that if you or I made the judgment calls, some of those calls would seem just as arbitrary and capricious.

of course they would, but the inclusions/exclusions would be more interesting

bobo

gotta give sam props for excluding this though, suck it david brooks

A Mad Puffin-curated Bee might have more nautical terms - clew, luff, bitt - and fewer birds and types of pasta. Probably more medievalisms - glaive, shrove. Might have to draw a clearer boundary around Yiddish, probably. (Like in the past few days it's allowed "yente" but excluded "bubbe," for no reason that I can discern.)

I had exactly the same experience vis-à-vis BUBO. Eventually I searched for it and found that nytbee.com site YMP mentioned. I too often end up typing words multiple times just in case I typed them wrong or thought I had typed them but didn't.

lol more BINNACLE and TAFFRAIL please

xpost

Tracer, we got fantail today

YMP OTM.

I take issue with not allowing "Britishisms" like bobby/lorry/yobbo, when theyre fine with obscure spanish words like HORCHATA which I'd never heard of til playing this game bcs not everyone has a mexican food-heavy culture!

(ok mayb not obscure to americans but sure as shit was to me)

I always know that one from visiting Barcelona.

But what I really came to post is:
tedious exercise: enumerating just how many words can have a -Y or -LY stuck on the end

Today's word I never heard (of before):
LAYETTE

Oh that's just a small lay.

eely was also new to me

Isn't that what the Christ said on the cross?

"Eely eely Lama sabachthani"?

I knew those two words. The one that I looked askance at was MELTY. I mean, are we four years old?

That was one I blindly typed and was surprised when it was accepted.

also:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25x3aIWs76E
#OneThread

I think we all await Trayce's opinion of today's PG.

Haw haw :)

I'm finding today hard tbh. It might be the savage hangover.

QB'ed it but had to rely on the NYT clue crew for more than I usually would.

Some stupid ones I object to cos of weird spelling or slang, such as kabob and bucko ffs.

But you liked BOBA and CATBOAT?

Thing is over don’t know why I am using hide tags, sorry.

Wordle in two, missed one measly letter in my first guess ffs. Starting to get annoyed how much luck is involved.

II try to have no goal in Wordle other than to finish before I run out of guesses and to type in some cool words along the way.

I & I

Which is exactly what just happened after I typed that.

Boba is fine, those are the bubbles in bubble tea. catboat i had to mash the keys t get that - even gogling for an answer didnt bring it. WTF is a catboat.

it's in the sequel to totoro

i also lucked into CATBOAT and my first thought was this: https://gifmovie.tumblr.com/post/45744018521/i-should-buy-a-boat

i wonder how much playing the bee on a tablet contributes to a better experience
because it’s easier to smash the screen keys

can’t believe I typed AIRWOLF before AIRFLOW lol

Ha! Also, what no WIFI?

Got to Genius on my own steam, mostly, although I did have to look up one last work because I was misspelling it,, then looked at hints for QB, got within two but then didn't want to bother so looked at Shunn.

James, I expect because that word is officially hyphenated.

Not the word I was thinking about.

my buddy is beta testing

Each guess must be a word (of any length). The similarity value is how similar word2vec thinks your word is to the secret word. The highest possible similarity is 100 (indicating that the words are identical and you have won). You will need more than six guesses. You will probably need dozens of guesses.

Words may be any part of speech. It's tempting to think only of nouns, since that is how normal semantic word-guessing games work. Don't get caught in the trap! Since our Word2Vec data set contains some proper nouns, guesses are case-sensitive. But I removed all but lower-case words from the secret word set, and if your word matches the secret word but for case, you win anyway. So if you want to know if the word is more like nice or Nice, you can ask about both.

Prior art. I discovered French Toast about 20 years ago, and immediately knew that I had to tell Dominus about it. He replied that in fact he and Ranjit had invented it 20 years before that, and called it "Plenty Questions".

But I wasn't thinking of French Toast when I invented this. Instead, I was thinking about Wordle and Worldle and about the dimensionality of data sets. I considered Filmle, a movie guessing game: You say "The Matrix", it says "Keanu Reeves has a bacon number of 3 where bacon is the lead actor in the target film." (and so on for Carrie-Ann Moss, Laurence Fishburne, and Hugo Weaving for actors at corresponding billings). But I don't care about movies. Too bad, because IMDB actually has exactly the data that you would need to implement it in a really easy form. Then I remembered word2vec, and here we are.

(Yes, I expect it to be way too hard -- that's not a bug, it's inherent vice. I promise that I have been able to solve some of these).

https://semantle.novalis.org/