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

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.

I have stopped doing the Bee for a while. It's very freeing.

bee is awful

I think it's having an adverse affect on my spelling as I make up words to see if it will take them.

Pangram today that’s not in the word list despite being so non obscure it has its own fkn emoji

What was it?

I was pleased to put in the hip musical genre 'boogaloo' yesterday.

I eventually guessed infinitude, but only then tried out finitude as a reflex. It is not a word I've ever encountered before

the paper version this week contains an “S”!!

!!!!!!11!!!1!eleven1!!!!

Frustrating today to have "capacitive" rejected while playing on a capacitive touchscreen.

once again pissed off that CAVITATE isn't a 'real' word

i mean has the guy even seen 'hunt for red october'

xps alembic ⚗️

My job is to get genius on the NYT spelling bee every day and my bf’s job is everything else

— dj fuck (@eggshellfriend) May 28, 2023

Yes that was annoying, also "capitate". And cavatappi! I thought all pastas were fair game.

Spelling Bee Buddy is actually (and finally) a useful tool!

They've also been experimenting with the design for letting you play previous days and after too many one UI that needed too many clicks I think they've finally figured it out.

oh no

DOGGO

i found the one a couple of thursdays ago very difficult - the one about black ops maybe it was just because i hadn’t done one in a couple of months? felt more like a friday or even saturday tbh. enjoyable tho

how are CYCLONIC and CYCLONICALLY not accepted?! come on, sam

lol i just realised i was posting about the crossword in the wrong thread, duh

Speaking of other nyt puzzles, Connections is getting better. usually they have at least one hard group, like the one with SWIMMERS today. There's a copycat site called conlextions that's good too.

Regarding Connections, the final swimmers category today was clever but not gettable on its own at all imo, and you had to know the four WNBA team names before that, which I also didn't know. My sister and I had a laugh over it

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