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

I had 4/5 with SIEVE and it took a lot of puzzled thinking before I got to SIEGE

The doubled letter in today's wordle about got me but so far still at 100%

my first 3

Wordle 200 3/6

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someday i want to join the holy "2" club

i’ve done two in my life, both 4s

finally started playing Wordle yesterday. crashed and burned as i learned the rules/method. got today's in 3! :D

I was disappointed that "hoopoe" wasn't accepted yesterday. I suppose not all birds are deemed worthy.

what sucks is that my win streak is now 6 -- which I believe is the world record -- but i've changed devices 3 times so it only says 2. really hard to deal with, but that's life

the secret sauce with wordle is that losing is pretty rare so you feel smart every time you play

my wordle starting point is generally meats/steam/atoms

I always go RAISE and unless there's three yellows or something key I go MOUNT or MOUND

If it's still looking bleak I go LINTY (if I did MOUND) or LINDY (if I did MOUNT)

I generally try and do strategic guesses to eliminate letters (instead of trying to solve the puzzle on guesses 2 or 3) so I'm not left with xIRES or something like that and guessing TIRES? FIRES? MIRES? WIRES? fuck I'm out of guesses

I revert to the old print-era shibboleth of ETAION SHRDLU

Hence I like TRAIN, ARISE, TONES as starting points

Like if I had xIRES all green, I'd probably guess WAFTS before trying to complete so I knew what my prefix was

Tried this for the first time and got it in 3, all downhill from here most likely.

the secret sauce with wordle is that losing is pretty rare so you feel smart every time you play

i think it's less that than being limited to one per day. if you could go as far as you wanted, i would have played for 35 minutes, lost a couple times, lost a heartbreaker, than quit, all on the first day

instead, I do it as I start my coffee. I have never lost. I am the world record holder

Also if you want to binge instead of waiting 24 hours, somebody built a practice version

https://octokatherine.github.io/word-master/

My current streak is 48

km, why not both?

I also do RAISE! or sometimes RATIO

I go with ROUTE because I think that early on you should cast a wide net to see what the vowels are (and once you've got an idea you can pretty easily add an S if need be). I'm not sure if my strategy is sound though as I barely got yesterday's word.

Hmm, got it in 2 this time. If this trend continues Sunday should be interesting.

xp i’m ORATE, just because these seem like the most common letters. S doesn’t seem to show up that much (i’ve never seen a plural).

Omg Leee, ROUTE is genius.

Just got my first ever "solved in two" moment by starting with ROUTE.

Thought process: Only U was green. So with R O T E out of commission, my next candidate letters are I N S H L D, but I have noticed that I tend to forget M exists, so tried SLUMP on a whim. Damn.

Like if I had xIRES all green, I'd probably guess WAFTS before trying to complete so I knew what my prefix was

this is a great strategy.

splitting hairs but i don't think ETAION SHRDLU works for a corpus of only five letter words, i read somewhere it was more like SEAORILTNU (but this may be questionable if no plurals); i go with AROSE.

You are right, ledge. I have heard STARLINE suggested but what you write is persuasive

Spelling Bee can be a bit of a slog, a drag, a well-known drag but the Wordle is just what the doctor ordered.

Whenever I lose my streak it's always because I've got 4/5 letters on the fifth guess. I ~could~ do a test guess to cover some possibilities for that missing letter. But I don't. I stab on guess 6 and stab on guess 7 and choke

My last streak was lost to xIVES. My RAISE -> MOUND -> LINTY hadn't covered any possibilities for the prefix. (W)ives, (F)ives, (G)ives, (H)ives, (J)ives all untested. (L)ives and (D)ives were eliminated as possibilities. I had two guesses and I don't remember which ones I guessed (probably WIVES and JIVES because I'm stupid) and which one it actually was (probably GIVES, ugh)

I actually don't recall if I did RAISE MOUND LINTY on that one now that I think about it :( Typically with three clues on the first round I deviate. Anyway whatever who GIVES a shit

Guess 7?

BTW, the tactic described above is actually outlawed in HARD MODE!
click the gear at the right corner

(got today in three)

(yeah, me too)

Dumb question but ive been playing wordle for weeks and i cant work out how people are pasting those blank results? Not that I would, but i see no option for it on the site.

there's a "share" button on the final results

Oh is it only six guesses ok!

tech spoiler:
the answers are in the source code, ALL OF THEM, he's hard coded the entire list in order, in plain text. it's a strange decision. also contains a list of all allowable words and the distribution of letters in those is slightly different from normal English. there were two uncommon words that used the top 5 letters from this distribution, but i forget what they were (and they were useless against today's word)

With regard to the spelling bee, I’ve started using the hints after I’ve exhausted my first run or two and want to chisel away, don’t know how people feel about that/postingfromzing

i do that too so i think it’s fine

Yeah I generally only go to the forum / grid after I reach Genius on my own.

It's not a hard and fast rule, though, there have been days when I only got to Great or Amazing all by myself, and went to the grid because I was out of ideas.

As I think I've said before, the task of finding, say, a 6-letter word beginning with PE is a very different task from just staring at hexagons hoping for a miracle. The process of elimination is itself a puzzle, where you're narrowing down possibilities and crossing off letters where you have found everything.

The VERY last resort is to just go look at the answers on nytbee.com and see the things I just could never have gotten on my own, like, say TOMMYROT, which I was never gonna get to by guesswork.

tomtit in the [spoiler]

holy canole, i've bagged a 2

Wordle 203 2/6

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The method, which will never work again, was to do the first guess, walk away for 4 hours, and then guess the exact word

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phOW-CZJWT0

there's a "share" button on the final results

There isnt for me. Is it possibly a noscript/adblock thing I wonder.

Oh! god, its on the popup screen and I'd just not noticed lol I am dense.

Bleurgh. I’ve switched to the tactic of fishing in the first two rounds but didn’t like the way it was going. Nearly went for a third round of new letters but didn’t quite have the nerve.

Wordle 204 5/6

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Today I, um, followed my bliss, I mean just typed whatever quasi-strategic words popped into my head, which was enjoyable and converged satisfactorily. Got close on four and clinched it on five.

With regard to the spelling bee is this thread in which we post words we wished were accepted, like VITTLE? I understand why it is isn’t but still.

My friends call it a futilibee when you see a word that you think should be accepted but isn't. WADI, TORY, PHAETON are recent examples

NAPHTHA not being accepted makes me so mad, every time.

today's Wordle was the toughest for me because I'm not clear on the rules for indicating repeated letters. I think I have it figured out now though.

Honestly, half of the fun of the Bee is complaining about included or excluded words.