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

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

once again i am asking for CAVITATE

go watch a fuckin submarine movie sam

xp to ummagumma, felt the same about aoxomoxoa a day or two ago, lol

No ABATTOIR or OBVIATOR and so many damn pasta terms but no ARRABBIATA sigh

no LYRICALITY, CYCLICITY or CYCLICALITY.
come on, sam

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/laicity

ACYCLICALLY

lol yeah you can have it one way, but not the other apparently

this was a tough one. i didn't get to queen bee rank.

genius rank i mean

what today? yeah on the tougher side. the pangram is v v satisfying tho

I mean Thurday's YACILRT. Lots of long words that aren't common.

i keep trying CRAIC to no avail

Thursday's had 4 pangrams. I got the first two easily, and the third after trying variations on the second, but the 4th only came to me after seeing the first three letters in the comments

https://christopherwolfram.com/projects/spelling-bee/

current Spelling Bee does not accept BACKBEAT as a word.

I KNOW

this is chuck berry erasure

Today is the worst.

I was unfamiliar with the pangram but I still found it and got to genius. Knowing Scrabble NWL words helped.

Because of the short word list? I like those from time to time, you can bash it out quickly and get on with your life

I'm OK with a short word list, but making the center letter J felt like a major troll.

I agree, I like short word lists, but today's had a bunch of words I have never heard used: jigging, jollily, jollying and joying

it’s not like ol sam to be consistent but yes some of those are non-US words, some are just weird and archaic.. and like, dude, that stuff but no GOJI?

I was shocked when I put the pangram in and it was accepted, like that's the sort of non-word that you have to try just to be sure.

really annoys me for some reason when the bee doesn’t recognise words that have been nyt crosswordese forever e.g. UGLI

usually capitalized. but so is arborio so whatever.

today’s seems very hard! i’ve found some pretty wild words but still not quite to genius

ahh and just as i say that i get there. still though! man!

Annoyed that I couldn’t use TROCHAIC, a nice fancy word

Or trochar. Today’s was hard! I don’t think I’ve even encountered two of the words

then how did you guess em huh

reached QB yesterday without any hints or clues thanks partly to this thread - the last word I found was TILTH :)

👑

ha, same!