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

ALOHA, HOLA and FINITO all seem fine to me but the other day MAHATMA was the only word i was missing to get queen bee and that annoyed me

it didn't take fief for me!

My mistake, it took it.
But not FIENDING?

I was also annoyed that it didn't take FIENDING

same

Hoo boy, the pangram today...

i was gonna say, this is the first time i got genius and THEN got the pangram

meanwhile we're not taking NONCONJOINING, which is a perfectly common enough term that i have used when booking hotel rooms (i haven't really but let's pretend)

i wasn’t surprised it didn’t take GIGGING

https://bullyusa.com/frog-gigging.html

this species of bird junco and this plural of a word I had already found jinni were the ones I couldn't think of today

same!

there were some words I never would have thought of today Tori, the plural of torus, and tortoni - a dessert featuring frozen sweetened condensed milk, whipped cream, coconut maroon crumbs, slivered almonds and chopped maraschino cherries?

Also torii, the gate of a Shinto shrine, I know what it stands for but haven’t ever seen the word beforelink

EFFABLE isn't accepted today (being the antonym to INEFFABLE, not something cruder), but that just makes me wonder what the threshold is for words to be accepted. I have a strong feeling that it's just what Sam arbitrarily decides (see: that one time COPE wasn't accepted).

here’s the autoreply they send when u email them

Thanks for solving and taking the time to offer us a word suggestion today!

Every Spelling Bee puzzle is hand-curated to focus on relatively common words, with a couple of tough ones here and there to keep it challenging. We occasionally miss words, and always appreciate our solvers letting us know. As a reminder, proper names and words that contain hyphens or apostrophes are not part of our word list.

In fairness to our wide-ranging audience, Spelling Bee generally avoids terms that are hyper-specific to any background or professional field, such as terms that might be familiar to, say, a physician or geologist, but not people outside of that area of expertise. We also do our best to ensure that any inappropriate or offensive terms will be omitted.

We welcome your feedback, and this inbox is monitored to take all relevant and appropriate suggestions into consideration, but we are unable to respond to individual inquiries.

If you have any questions unrelated to a word suggestion, want to share an experience or need assistance with any of our other puzzles, please reach out to us at our Games Care email address: nytga✧✧✧@nyti✧✧✧.c✧✧. You can also follow our editor Sam Ezersky for additional Spelling Bee updates and discussion.

Best,

The New York Times Games Team

So HABOOB and NENE are known to non-specialists. Okay.

:) I like the word haboob!

Yeah the specialist line is nonsense tbf but lookit the fun is in the try

today I was surprised that they didn't accept the word billable, tried it a couple of times to make sure, but let it go

oh wait, they did accept it! sorry

two words I couldn’t get today both ended in double vowels bailee, libelee - which is a future reminder

also surprised the puzzle today also accepted an anatomical word and two related words, one entirely linguistic and the other both anatomical and linguistic

labia, labial, bilabial link

sung to the tune of matchmaker, matchmaker

Okay I give, I subscribed. Questione: How do you know how many possible words there are? Does it tell you when you've found them all?

Yep

Queen bee scote also 2x the "amazing" score which you can click into to see on the app which gives you some idea

i use https://www.nytbee.com/ to check how close i am to QB

My preferred site is https://www.shunn.net/bee/latest.

Two of words I didn't get (I looked already) were SUCH obvious crossword puzzle answers, I forgot both of them pop up ALL the time but no one has literally ever used them in a sentence ime.

pangram today was bullshit imho

My preferred site is https://www.shunn.net/bee/latest.

― Carte Blanchett (Leee), Tuesday, September 14, 2021 1:25 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

too many ads. also a bit too much info

I got the Pangram today and can't remember what it was lol

Agreed, kind of a lackluster set of letters today, even though I'm with a word two of the pangram.

it was the first word I thought of in this puzzle for the first time

I usually start with 4-letter words beginning with the first word in the alphabet. Today most of the words had only 4 letters.

The 5-letters were hard

the 6-letter words also

three of the 5-letter words (starting with kn-) and separately the two 6-letter words were related to each other in spelling

the pangram was a compound word, for the 2nd or 3rd time since I've been doing this puzzle

I missed knoll, which kept me from QB, and as a Cocteaus fan, that kind of stung.

Ooh today's is much meatier.

finding today quite difficult tbh.

I'M SUPPOSED TO FIND 49 WORDS IN THIS MESS HOW???

Im at 46 but its been a hard slog

Second pangram and at 47 i really am tapped out

at least so far there are no crazy words like dugong

I at least got that one. Came home today from a long day of errands without enough time to focus. Think I got like 27 or so before I had to go do other stuff. I look forward to feeling stupid tomorrow.

I've only had experience with this recently but today's was the most brutal

haven't encountered one of these yet that has had only 4 four-letter words. that's what I usually go for first, expecting to get a lot of them

i got really into the two no touch puzzles and recommend them
https://krazydad.com/play/starbattle/

Ooohh I just jammed through a few of those and it’s fun! Thanks, forks!

yer welcome! i find them obsessive and challenging to specific parts of my brain that aren't especially elastic.

(for non-subscribers, NYT runs two of those every day in the print edition)

Whoops I got to #7 and I have the first occurrence of not being able to deduce the next star and having to make a strategic guess. Hmm. I think.

with the harder ones, you have to actually game out some six or seven moves ahead when you get a 50/50. it's difficult to do in ink!

Does that no-touch game indicate if you've successfully solved a particular puzzle?

it does

or rather the electronic version does

The krazydad thing is amazing and now I can’t sleep

I just broke into Book 2. :|

still don't think I understand it

I didn't either (hence my confusion on why I hadn't solved a puzzle) but it's a little like sudoku in that every row and column and region has to have exactly X stars, with the added difficulty of stars not being adjacent to each other.

i can attest that over time you will start to get better at the two no touch but I fuck up every third one in a way that requires me to start over from scratch.

I should mention that there's an app: Star Battle Go. $9 gets you 3000 puzzles, basically set for life. I'm recommending it.

app also has tutorials which i have yet to try.

loved today’s spelling bee with only one point five vowels

I liked the one from today too

yesterday’s was interesting, there were not that many words and there were a lot of words that were hard to think of - curium, tritium, tatami, cacti, circuit, tutti

today’s was also hard and with not that many words, but I was able to think of more

surprised it didn't accept WHINGE

I was surprised by that too

Whinge is British

but seems universal

i get not having british words like COLOUR where there's a one-to-one american equivalent but it's not like whinge is the british spelling of whine, cause brits also have whine. it's just a different word. and americans occasionally use it. e.g. here's a maureen o'dowd column from 2014 where she uses it https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/30/opinion/dowd-is-barry-whiffing.html

I may have played too much star battle in the past 48 hours

what hath I wrought

same!! totally addictive

The whole hand-curated thing just opens Sam up to so much griping.

star battle is a problem, yes. did you guys get the app?

today I couldn’t think of ambit, beige, baggie, biggie or gimme. those last few remind me to try colIoquial words. I got iamb, but iambi seems exceptionally esoteric

well that’s the thing with this puzzle. usually you’ll get a sense of the editor’s boundaries, but with this it too often feels random. some dog breeds but not a labrador? etc

It's a miniature of every prescriptive / descriptive lexicographical / usage dispute ever. Why this and not that?

But focused on one individual and his particular idiosyncratic segment of the elephant.

If you or I were to curate the Bee, there would be just as many "Why this and not that?" gripes. Just different ones.

Many years ago I was a magazine copyeditor and in a moment of rashness I decided that "disk" was a shape and "disc" was a computer storage medium. Or maybe it was the other way around. I forget. But it's probably still out there in a disused style guide somewhere. My secret shame.

it’s the other way around and that’s pretty standard now i think? from tiny acorns…

i disagree that anyone else’s would be as arbitrary but i know what you mean. in any case you do kind of get a feeling for the personality of any editor. ezersky’s does not beguile me. for instance, this is a guy who says WOOT

it’s the other way around and that’s pretty standard now i think?

Okay but what is this then?

https://toppng.com/public/uploads/preview/parental-advisory-png-white-115522471060relexpojy.png

dead media

it’s a shape

compact discs i.e. redbook CD format media, are not a computer storage medium.

just go with the shifting plurals in that sentence alright

I had a dreamed about the SB last night, and what's more, S was one of the letters.

today's pangram seemed esoteric to me, I would never have gotten gunport

I like having tried to solve the low word count puzzles of the last few days though

TFW when you're at 43/170 but have accepted that you're not going to get the last 4-letter word.

I haven't encountered a puzzle with that many words yet, I try hardest to get every 4-letter word, it seems just

I stop at Genius and feel like a loser when two or three of my friends get to Queen Bee

Like, how tf

Irrationally upset that fronton isn't accepted today. The cultural fading of jai alai continues apace.

got the pangram today easily as with most of the puzzles, but with so many words it was hard to get them all - rotini, croci and tortoni (my nemesis, that horrible dessert) were all beyond me - but it burns me that I got friction, the pangram, but not fiction

tricot and tricorn came to me for some reason when I was thinking about tri- words, but I just made a guess with triton

not accepting PENTANGLE (a pangram!) is a halloween season outrage

As a fan of the band, I too was disappointed!

haha! that would-be pangram was one of the first words that jumped out at me

I got one of today's pangrams easily, but not the other, I couldn't think of any words that started with egg

Got genius today thanks to the thread title

I missed that one!

there seem to be a lot of bird-related words, today also pipit

I'm about done with the Italian foods. Tortoni, rotini, (both used recently) focaccia a couple days ago.

Meanwhile no prion, no introit

:) I have been primed to think about Italian foods. I got tortoni and rotini today.

To be complete you have to scour for every element in the table of elements and every bone in the body and its latin plural, although other common medical words like prion and embolize are ignored

sorry, didn't mean to reveal those words

ha those were the 2 i was missing to get queen be (i had long given up and would never have quested tortoni)

focaccia is fine imo but tortoni and rotini.... cmon

yeah i find raer foreign food words kinda start to blur the line of proper noun. also where the game shows its ass re: western-centrism

yeah why is miso accepted, but not mirin?

or nori!

yesterday's frankly a murderer's row of bullshit words that are only ever encountered in the spelling bee

And yet a bunch that would be perfectly good in Scrabble or an NYT crossword weren't. So it goes. My earlier assessment stands (that any one curator would probably yield the same complaints).

To Dan S.'s list of things to try I would add animals generally. Many times I struggle with common household words but can come up with shit like "okapi" or whatever.

Miso? That has an S though!

I've only been playing this a week or so and am so frustrated by the words that are not in the previous list!

Precious list, not previous. Ugh!

Miso? That has an S though!

Ah you’re right we never get S’s - I think i was mixing it up with my nyt crossword words lol

anyway the point was mirin should totally be in the list, as should nori!

I agree that MIRIN should be accepted, especially since UDON is a regular word in SB.

today's omissions included undaunted

and untenanted >:[

today's omissions included undaunted

― Dan S, Thursday, October 14, 2021 2:59 PM (twenty minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

i literally thought i was going nuts so tried it a second time. still can't believe that omission.

xp I couldn't even think of tenant

And exudate!

This is the problem with a hand curated word list, omissions like undaunted are bound to happen.

Ugly letters today, I got spoiled on two words and I didn't even mind it.

Yeah I got to Genius and am stuck with 22 words in. Feels like there should be more in there, but there just aren't.

there were only a few words that had more than 5 letters. I got chichi, archaic and harridan but couldn't get the pangram today arachnid or anarchic

as far as puzzles go, I'm getting much better at the NYT hard sudoku and the LAT expert sudoku. The LAT impossible sudoku is still a challenge, because it requires visualiziing multiple moves in advance to solve it

I've been doing the NYT hard sudoku too! I think today's will stymie me though.

I got QB today, which is much more tractable than yesterday's, even though 2-4 of the words imo stretch the definition of common.

I feel like a DUNCE for falling one word short of yesterday's QB.

When you get to QB, does it change from Genius so you know? Because it seems unlikely I will get to that point and see it in person.

i think it’s the first time i got to genius without discovering a single 4 letter

xp yep a little graphic screen and everything

Nice! Something to strive for

QB status mostly eludes me. I usually do these in the morning. I get to Genius and stop. By the next morning I forget where my mind was, what avenues I'd pursued, and what I'd tried and hadn't tried, so seeing the answers the next day isn't very illuminating.

An exception: a few days ago I was already at Genius trying to get to Queen Bee. I think I saw, but didn't try, "ladyland". Turns out the word I was missing was the rather more pedestrian "landlady." Reader, I kicked myself.

electric landlady

lodger? i ardly even knew er

Yesterday's omissions included DETUNE and DETUNED which I thought was weird

They also omitted UNCEDED and I thought they might do something good and include it next time so I wrote them asking them to do so

yeah not accepting UNCEDED is pretty ridiculous
DETUNE/DETUNED also (esp considering UNTUNED was accepted) but it’s one of those commonly used but not formally defined tech terms maybe

xp i was pretty disappointed getting QB was just the same screen you get for genius, was hoping for fireworks or something

also missing yesterday were unindicted and untended

Yesterday had FALAFEL and FLAUTA but not TEFF or FUFU, which are staple foods in Africa.

But how many US citizens know what a falafel is versus what injera is? I mean, I get your point, but they sell glorified flautas at 7-11.

teff was a v weird omission imo

For some perverse reason I thought "tuff" would work.

So. There are areas where Sam is decently conversant and others where he isn't. Birds yes, geology no. Foods kinda. Graphic design and book production no, but jocular loanwords (caca, nada, primo) yes.

chica but no mami iirc

Right, and mama but not dada.

Instead of getting incensed I find it kind of fascinating. As noted above, I am 1000% certain that my own vocabulary is full of blind spots and inconsistencies. But then, I don't have my idiosyncratic judg(e)ments paraded in front of the sentient world by the New York Fucking Times. Which is as it should be.

Would it be better or worse to have a committee, something like Merriam-Webster's usage panel? Possibly worse. As we've found, committees have blind spots too. Would it be better or worse to still have one person, but instead it's a different person? Like, say, Bryan Garner or James McBride or Gretchen McCullough. Or, for that matter, Will "Eat My" Shortz.

For everyone who found Garner too prescriptive you'd have someone who found McCullough too lenient.

So I keep coming back to: might as well be Sam (for all my gripes)

one person, but instead it's a different person

^ this

food is where the arbitrariness of including some obscure words but not others is most obvious imo

getting really good at italian and indian food names though!

Hes a disaster imo, its the inclusion of absolutely obscure specialist jargon as and when suits him and the omission of perfectly valid but rare words besides

I hate him

Then go do a different free fun thing maybe?

Just a thpught

*thought

no we're through the looking glass, ymp, locked in an embrace of hate, entwined in a spiral down that last endless staircase

Ok

Enjoy

Meanwhile I feel like there a whole lot of other entertainment options on offer and you could just, y'know, go do those things

Or not

Whatevs

but it's such a good game. its current steward is simply for the birds. specifically, the nene

Watch Sam whip

Watch Sam nene

If I ever see a nene in the wild I will divide it up into 4 parts and package them in 4 boxes and send all of them to Sam by special post.

It is thought that the nene evolved from the Canada goose (Branta canadensis), which most likely arrived on the Hawaiian islands about 500,000 years ago, shortly after the island of Hawaiʻi was formed. This ancestor is the progenitor of the nene as well as the prehistoric giant Hawaiʻi goose (Branta rhuax)[5] and nēnē-nui (Branta hylobadistes). The nēnē-nui was larger than the nene, varied from flightless to flighted depending on the individual, and inhabited the island of Maui. Similar fossil geese found on Oʻahu and Kauaʻi may be of the same species. The giant Hawaiʻi goose was restricted to the island of Hawaiʻi and measured 1.2 m (3.9 ft) in length with a mass of 8.6 kg (19 lb), making it more than four times larger than the nene.

o__O

Its not free, that's for starters

The fun is locked in with the hate, that's additional

My posts are free btw, you could read other ones by the same token

I don't mind the quirks, it's part of the fun. today I got dammit, which surprised me

quirks are fine, it’s the inconsistency that irks
nene is fine, pudu, not so much

a few weeks ago there was a perfectly reasonable word it didn’t accept which also happened to be a pangram, that was esp annoying

pudu? I've never seen that word before

It's just a game determined by someone else's rules, I still like playing it

lol people who enjoy this game are also people who are more likely to complain about the rules applied inconsistently
but yeah that’s kinda part of the charm i suppose

i’m just curious how the process works, the word list must be generated automatically and then vetoed

I just subscribed to the Sunday NYT a few weeks ago, so only recently have I been enjoying full access to Spelling Bee. And I took Twitter off my phone, so it's my new thing I look at while I'm bored during the day. (Although ironically, people posting Spelling Bee screenshots on Twitter is what made me interested in it in the first place.)

husband got me hooked up a few weeks ago and comparing words at the end of the day is something we both look forward to now

the paper version actually is edited by someone else but i haven’t played it enough to sense their quiddities

What about their agonies?

I only play the free one someone linked to upthread and my 'thing' is to get within about 20 words or so and want to burst with frustration so I look at the spoilers. Frequently screaming at what's allowed and what isn't - does seem part of the whole experience!

hate-solving, if you will

Yeah this is not imo big deal stuff its ok to hate the puzzle setter when the puzzle solution becomes subjective im sorry if hes anybodys cousin but its valid for the 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

i got everything but the pangram but i did get fairly close with MEGACOCK

lol

I got QB yesterday but spent an embarrassingly long time 1+ points away because I was overlooking COOK.

Yesterday I am having a tough time forgiving lunular. On the margin of acceptable is landau.

Today we have a reasonably charming pangram situation. For me, genius status arrived early at 30 words but that means a long and potentially exasperating 13-word slog if I am to pursue QB.

Hope that we can all get one of Sam's favorite birds today.

Not without this thread

I got most of them, but didn't think of noncom as referring to a non-commissioned officer

in 1950s manhattan everyone would have known what a noncom was therefore it’s valid

which is why WOOT is so upsetting, it exists outside the wes anderson diegesis

i mean there are other reasons too

I QB'd yesterday! NONCOM I got as a guess. I guessed COMMIT too, rhyming it with "comet" and thinking "this is some silly textile arts term"

Thanks also to the thread title for the freebie

both husband and i got genius yesterday and got most words between the two of us except for this very common word: COMMON
facepalm

Omg we got QB tonight! 1st time ever!

i'm two words away and stumped ;_;

QB as well but really because i got lucky just randomly getting DOETH

ha that was my last word as well and i only got it from the grid telling me i needed a DO 5 letter word

the two words i was missing yday where TEETHE and TOOTHED. i had TEETH, TEETHED, TOOTH 🤦

surprised they didn't take DOLDRUM today

same

This got me trying to sign up for a bloody NTY games account, and something went weird. It half-did a transaction, said it errored, didnt take my money, and now I cant try again and they have the WORST "contact us" help links.

i don't know if this will help you Trayce, but if you do try again later and you have a paypal account, you should use that to sign up for any NYT subscriptions rather than your credit card.

NYT deliberately makes it difficult for you to cancel/modify subscriptions by making you call in to customer service - you can circumvent all that bs by just canceling your automatic payments on the paypal site. 

Today leans heavy on food again with CARBONARA, BARBACOA, CORNCOB

Weirdly quiet on the avian front

Thanks Roz, alas I dont have paypal :( i alredy have a NYT sub is the stupid part, and I just cant add a games sub to it. its weird, it sort of half-worked initially and I was able to access the full games site? then the pending charge disappeared and now its locked out again. Gah.

lol’d at today’s pangram. well played, sam!

the site’s been down for me for the last half hour or so

I saw that, it should be back up now.

Also, I'm a little miffed that a Y4 (YEGG) that I learned from SB isn't being accepted today.

That's a hobo/criminal word, very rarely used these days

Last time I read it was my last re-read of Jack Black (not that one).

Today's prominent category of obscure words is... foreign currency! Birds and pasta strangely underrepresented.

I think it's been close to two full weeks since we've last had a bingo (where each of the letters has at least one word that starts with it), which to me and my OCD is kind of distressing.

Hm, I have never really tracked that

I found the schef (adam schefter ha ha)'s government name, to no avail.

discovering the hints has made it easier to get QB (i only look at them after i've hit genius) which i've now gotten like 3-4 times in the last week but it came at the cost of me wasting way more time on this game

the hints feature doesn't work on my partner's phone! nothing at all happens when you click "today's hints." maybe it's for the best.

after genius I usually give up. Today I got friar, but not friary. also of course fray, but not affray and the puzzle didn't accept miliary (which is a common medical term), or milliary, referring to a Roman mile

Dr. C., I also find that the hints page doesn't work from in the app, but it does work from a web browser. Which actually is better because it makes it easier to toggle back and forth.

Ok today's PG is pretty obscure, and I had to cheat to get it.

Agreed. I got it and thought "WTF dude, how can you know that and not know so many other common words?"

I got genius yesterday and today Ive only found six words... is saturday always hard?The crossword was quite hard too.

Also how is pfft a word and not pepito?

NYT's crosswords progress in difficulty, starting on Monday (easiest) to Saturday (hardest). Sunday is longest -- sometimes it's hard, more often it's more gimmicky.

The Bee doesn't seem to adhere to any kind of difficulty progression, meaning that any given day could be really hard -- at least in my experience.

one of the hardest spelling bees ever today

don't know how but I got the pangram today, some distant memory of an archaic word

I always have the most trouble with the compound words, got tipoff, but not tiptoe or tiptop

also didn't get potpie

managed to get to genius without the pangram which felt like a real achievement. was v surprised that pfft was accepted

Considerably more palatable today! (Although I know some players don't like the high point total days.)

I got loads really quickly today, easy wins with the IN UN and ING combos

Yep hit QB today (just the last three words with hints - as always, it was the easy obvious words that I had missed!)

there were only two un-s and one in- unless you count inning and union, which I don't, but 19 -ings!

i got QB but it took completely unreasonable amount of time to come up with GIVING/UNGIVING after getting everything else
was a fun one today!

It was voguing that escaped me (wouldnt it be spelt with an e?). I'm still not at QB yet, but I have 132 points so i guess im not far off?

GAH the only 2 i missed were the 2 in Dan's post lol. Of all words to miss.

Today was a bit frustrating for me - got there but it was messy.

Futilibees:

continuo

tiffin

conn

nuncio

Words I didn't get without hints

uncuff

coconut

woops sorry if that spoils -

I missed GOUGING yesterday to fall 1 word short of QB -- that one seems to always elude me.

I was also peeved tiffin was not allowed. And yet finito was. Que?

Course cunt was the first word I tried wannit.

If that worked it would have been in like 9 of the last 15 bees, tbh. That combo of letters has come up a lot.

Nice collection of most commonly used words here: https://nytbee.com/ (scroll down to Haven't I seen these words before?).

"finito" was our last word to reach Genius (which is our victory condition/stopping point), so i'm glad it worked!

the 2 words i was missing yesterday were DEFAT and DEFATTED. fake words

especially since FATTED wasn't accepted!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatted_calf

DEFAT was the last one i got so sure enough i forgot to do DEFATTED

today’s was kind of a slog for me

No tuple, punnet, unpeel and honestly whose nephew is this fraud exactly

“unpeel” redundant, surely just “peel” gets you there

but then if that’s so, what on earth does UNOPEN mean

whoops sorry all jeez

Hahah thank you *yoink* todays one has done my head in.

I cannot see the pangram on todays for love or money.

And it seems theyre skating the edge with some answers I'd class as 2 words, which makes it a bit unfair (like pullout for eg)

Yeah today was really rough in terms of what it took and what it didn't, not gonna lie. Got the pangram and got to genius but QBing, nope. Then I got so vexed that I peeked and gah, double nope.

Genius is good going today imo, im at standstill some ways back

Leave it there, seriously. It's ugly. You're welcome.

tired of tomtit so wordle is the new hotness

https://www.powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle/

basically hangman with some nice twists, only one word a day, six guesses max.

nice! got today’s on my 4th guess

same!

LOL got the panagram first go today. It just immediately jumped at me.

omg how on earth did i miss HEMP

important wordle rule that i just discovered: the word CAN contain two of the same correct letter and it doesn't have a mechanism for telling you that except you guessing.

Intriguing.

Right now I would say I have no interest in a new word game timesuck

Then again that's also what I said about the Bee when I first saw it. Gah, reusing letters? I will never get the hang of that because it's different from Scrabble

-signed, Currently at a 223-puzzle streak on the NYT crossword

Who just re-upped for Fireball

not a timesuck! three minutes a day at most!

Yes, worth it! Thanks forks - did you also bring up Two Dots? Not words but someone mentioned it and now I am hooked.

forks, "not a timesuck" brings up problems of its own, unfortunately.

Some days I actively need to banish time. If I can finish the Bee before getting out of bed, and do the crossword before breakfast, wtf am I supposed to do for the rest of the day? Work at my job, like a savage? Fuck that.

Got my first QB today :) I did have to cheat a bit on one word, which I completely didnt know so had to cross check via the discussion thread clue people.

congrats! :)

is "Two dots" "Two No Touch"? If so, unfortunately that's me.

Lately I seem to have a knack for QB minus one, which usually means it's something other than typical English orthography. If there's a structure like -ED, -ING, or -ATION, I get the stuff that works in those patterns but miss stuff that is outside it, like pasta or birds.

Yesterday the one I couldn't get was BABKA. Today it was DOODAD.

I got the wordle on my second guess today!

trying to think of the best wordle word to start with. "Atoms"? "Safer"?

I would reveal my go-to wordle start word, but then I would be practically giving away the answer to today's puzzle.

I lucked out and got four of the letters - two in the right place, two in the wrong place.

LOL, Lily that has me guessing your starter word! TIDAL?

nope!

Back in the typesetting era we would have worked backward from ETAOIN SHRDLU. Which really only helps on the first few guesses, because orthography kicks in and starts constraining your options.

tired?

I’ve been starting with a three-vowel word

that's the one!

ok this is pretty fun. i got wordle in 3 tries, which is probably a lot of luck however it’s interesting how quickly you narrow it down

todays SB was odd. Doggo, really? And wtf is noodging (I had to literally start making up words to work that one out and just hit it by chance)

tracer’s post upthread about how ‘Sam Ezersky is a guy who says WOOT’ is so otm

Trayce I think you're officially One Of Us now.

Hehe yes its very addictive!

the thread title that keeps on giving

lol

just reading m john harrison’s most recent book and the word “tilth” makes a small, matter-of-fact appearance

I get emails and promotional stuff for gardening supplies and--surprise!--there's a tool called a "tilther."

pure tilth

I figured this title would be more helpful than, say, The Dildo in the Dodo.

Hello Random House? Have I got a spec title for you...

Had no idea what one of todays pangrams was until someone in the Hive comments said they didnt think they'd have to refer to Urban Dictionary to get the word.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/09/crosswords/spellingbee-tips.html

Exhausting day today -- genius addy 317!

has there ever been this many pangrams?!

8 pangrams seems kind of ridiculous!

Yeah I am fucking stumped, I can only find 3 so far. What the hell

there's 8??? i have 6 and thought i was doing well.

for those who aren't planning on finishing: CONTROVERSIAL MOD EDIT

sorry sorry! picked the wrong formatting

Ah cmon

Also two versions of that one word is normal or not?

I'm really sorry!

they do accept alternate spellings of some words, e.g. mama/mamma and tepee/teepee. I didn't know they would accept it for this word, just tried it, but I thought I remembered that like traveling/travelling, the word can be spelled two ways

I forgive you but not him

i found 7 pangrams (one by sheer luck), no idea what the eighth is.

fun day! I always prefer it when there are a gazillion words to find

thank you mod for deleting my post. I also like it when I can find a lot of words, but sometimes when there are only a few words I do better

i don’t even remember how many pangrams i got. they really should highlight them in the word list

Yeah the reddit spelling bee mob are saying the same. Ive now got 4, even using the grid Im stumped. I try to hold off looking at the hive's clues til im close to genius but motherfuck this one's a hard one.

we haven’t had indian or italian dishes in a while..

well we could have. GARAM was there for the taking yesterday.

Italian food makes a slight return with AIOLI.

I need to remind myself sometimes to try things that verge on nonsense - reduplicative words and babytalk like CANCAN, BOOHOO, BOOBOO, MOOLA, GLOB.

Yesterday's had the stupidest one ive seen in a while, bollix

wordle

first time trying the game
4/6

wordle

I didn't mind seeing Trayce's word but today's exercise in futilibee was WAHINE but not WADI

i have a 97% wordle get rate, only missed the first one when i didn't know what i was doing.

never have seen or heard of tommyrot

yeah got everything but that
at least today’s single 6-letter wasn’t particularly difficult, thanks to this thread

my unluckiest ever wordle result:

https://i.imgur.com/wcbjIOI.jpg

the answer was GRIPE.

TRUSS almost got me yesterday but so far i'm still 100% on wordle

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

⬜⬜⬜🟨⬜
🟩⬜🟨🟩⬜
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

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

⬜⬜⬜🟨🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

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

🟨🟨⬜⬜⬜
⬜⬜🟨⬜⬜
⬜🟩🟩🟨⬜
⬜🟩🟩⬜🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

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.

I am coming to the same conclusion, al"bee"it reluctantly. upthread you will see me expressing irritation with that approach. I am starting to embrace it now

Heh.

Wait, kinder, what do you mean by “indicating repeated letters”?

So say the word was DODGY
If I get _ _ D_Y obviously either of D and Y could be in the remaining blank letters

But if I put A Y D R Y (pretend this is a real word) and the first Y is grey does that mean it's not in the blank letters at all or in another position - because grey is supposed to indicate that letter is not in the word at all (according to the 'how to play') but clearly that's incorrect. So I still wondered if there might be a second Y in one of the other positions, say YEDLY.
I tried something similar today to figure out the 'rules' and I think maybe it treats remaining blank letters as 'the word' so it would be yellow if it was there a second time but in a different position?
I always forget that if they're 'green' they could still be somewhere else in there, anyway.

So sorry yeah I didn't really mean 'indicating repeated letters' - more what I can infer from the colours of the remaining letter guesses given that grey doesn't mean it's not in the word at all if it's already been found. I've only played it a few times so still figuring it out!

i went from a "2 performance" to a 5 rounder today. i thought i had really figured out things. :(

Does it really matter? Seems to be a question of luck.

staring at the crossword puzzle, i asked myself, does it really matter

I'd say no.

@ kinder, yeah if there is a repeated letter in your guess, they'll green one if it's in the correct position, and yellow the other if there is a second occurrence of the same letter; the second letter will be grey otherwise.

So if the solution is PATTY, the guess TOTEM will get you yellow/green, TACIT will get you yellow/yellow.
If the solution is DATUM, the guess TOTEM will get you grey/green, the guess TACIT will get you yellow/grey.

Thanks! That's nice and clear.

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

― Rabbit Pen Warren (Leee), Sunday, 9 January 2022 09:02 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

I am coming to the same conclusion, al"bee"it reluctantly. upthread you will see me expressing irritation with that approach. I am starting to embrace it now

― nonsensei (Ye Mad Puffin), Sunday, 9 January 2022 09:04 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

there is a longer game within the game - we are meant to slowly figure out who sam is

Intriguing theory. It's like a Where's Waldo or Kit Williams https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masquerade_%28book%29.

Sam is interested in birds and Italian food. Has no interest in British politics or chemical compounds. Relatively few modes of preindustrial transport, except for oared craft. No knowledge of the terminology of the age of sail.

Sam likes loanwords but only from certain languages - Spanish but not French; indigenous Americans but not Arabic.

His affection for childish nonsense words indicates that he is either a manchild or a father.

Possibly Jewish, probably not Catholic.

kit Williams was local when i was growing up and one of the places in town used to get their lawn dug up regularly because it featured in the book.

there's still a clock he designed in the arcade in Cheltenham

lol, i had a copy of masquerade as a kid. and theories!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTz1aTIX1u8

absurdle
https://qntm.org/files/wordle/index.html

The mechanics of Absurdle are identical to Wordle, or as close as I can make them. Among other things, they use the same word lists. (There are actually two word lists in Wordle: one is a list of 2,315 words which can appear as answers, and the other is a list of 10,657 rather more obscure words which are allowed as guesses but will never appear as answers.) The major difference is behind the scenes.

Wordle picks a single secret word at the beginning of the game, and then you have to guess it. Absurdle gives the impression of picking a single secret word, but instead what it actually does is consider the entire list of all possible secret words which conform to your guesses so far. Each time you guess, Absurdle prunes its internal list as little as possible, attempting to intentionally prolong the game as much as possible.

Absurdle 8/∞

⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
⬜⬜🟨⬜⬜
⬜🟨⬜⬜⬜
🟨⬜🟨🟨⬜
🟨🟨⬜🟨⬜
⬜🟩🟩⬜🟩
⬜🟩🟩⬜🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Absurdle 10/∞

⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
⬜🟨🟨⬜⬜
⬜🟩🟩🟩🟩
⬜🟩🟩🟩🟩
⬜🟩🟩🟩🟩
⬜🟩🟩🟩🟩
⬜🟩🟩🟩🟩
⬜🟩🟩🟩🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

oh brother

Absurdle 5/∞

⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
⬜🟨⬜⬜⬜
⬜🟩🟩⬜⬜
🟨🟩🟩⬜⬜
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

not bad considering 4 is the most the creator thinks is possible!

no spoilers but one of the things with Wordle is that I often forget American words are spelled differently to their British version, today I almost lost my streak because I nearly didn't realise that

not bad considering 4 is the most the creator thinks is possible!

Oh, I see, I think.

What was your word choice, harbl? I can't reduce Absurdle past 7

I actually tried the example given on the Absurdle to get to 4 but it didn’t work with the current word list I think.

i don't remember at all, sorry! i like absurdle better than wordle

it may have been bride or drive but i can't be sure

have ended with JAZZY twice

Oh yeah, I just had that one!

actually just got it again. the way i play seems to force it in that direction.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0COws8SyQus

Absurdle 5/∞

⬜🟨⬜⬜⬜
⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
⬜⬜🟨⬜⬜
⬜⬜🟩🟩🟨
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

SEAMY
GROIN
BUTCH
FLEET
TWEED

Took some trial and error, I can get 6 fairly reliably. Put Y in the first guess so it doesn't appear in the result, gets rid of words ending double letter Y e.g. JAZZY. Getting S out of the way also helpful, and as many other high frequency letters as you can.

Ahhhh that's a good tactic

Wordle 207 4/6

🟨⬜⬜⬜⬜
🟩⬜🟨🟨⬜
🟩🟩🟨⬜🟨
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Started off with ADIEU today after reading about it from someone else's strategy.

Ooh thanks for Absurdle, I like it

Absurdle 5/∞

⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
⬜⬜🟨⬜⬜
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

5 on my first Absurdle. I did my first Wordle in 2 so there’s some serious beginner’s luck going on here

Absurdle 5/∞

⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
⬜🟩⬜⬜🟩
⬜🟩⬜⬜🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Tomorrow's Wordle answer should be MATHS. See how they like it

— Alex Selby-Boothroyd (@AlexSelbyB) January 12, 2022

I’ve managed to get in five or six attempts pretty regularly on Absurdle - still trying to get that elusive four. Anyone else has managed?

Lots of fives but no fours - weirdly the one mention in the notes (aiery/canst/dolma/offal) doesn't work, laugh/lauch/pupal are all possible after that.

But if you guess pupal it gives you the win, instead of carrying on with laugh/lauch and giving a grey for the Ps and a yellow for the U.

sorry, not lauch (whatever that is), the c is not available. laugh still works though.

it has been pointed out to me that 'laugh' is not available at that point as 'a' in second place has already been ruled out.

Your point still stands: that the example given on the website does not work.

tangential but with wordle going supermainstream it's time for new new hotness:
https://wikitrivia.tomjwatson.com/

my top so far is 10

11 on my first go, the last one actually had the date in the title but I misread 1598 as 1958

Nice, thanks! I got to two, then tried again for ten.

okay, 12

I like some of the titles & subtitles:

Jesus. Deity.
Diet of Worms. Diet.

Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire did not end in 1AD you fuckers.

Okay, 14. I'll stop until i get to 18

Mount Olympus, Mountain of Greece, created: 1938

Gigabyte Technology, Electronics company, created: 789

none of these other games including wordle or absurdle are as interesting as spelling bee to me

Puma clothing company apparently created in the year 0.

Yeah this is bad. Puma (brand), German clothing and consumer goods manufacturer, created: 0

Lol I posted that without refreshing the thread first oops

there are bugs, seems like they're wiki related. hoping they clean it up if there's enough interest!

needs a "complain about this date" button for sure

So OCOTILLO and however many other trees are accepted but not PIPAL??

No ITAL either.

Today I learned that Okinawa was created in 753CE and that Homicide (the act of human killing) dates to 1,300 BCE

This is just to say

I have eaten
the bread
⬛️⬛️⬛️⬛️⬛️

the lemon
🟨⬛️🟨⬛️⬛️

the meals
🟨⬛️⬛️🟨🟩

the slime
🟨🟩⬛️🟩⬛️

the plums
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

— evilbooster’d 💉 (@evilrooster) January 10, 2022

is 1300 bce cain offing abel?

the "created" places are so infuriating. i need to stop playing this dumb thing.

lol’d at “The Time Machine (1960 film)” card
i find i can actually place things more accurately just based on the pics, a hairstyle or a painting style are good clues

17! getting there!

peaked at 23, really gotta walk away, all the dumbass things make my blood boil more than this mild diversion is worth it. one i don't think we've vented about is the arbitrary and silly dates when various art movements and historical periods "ended." also mannn there are a lot of Nazi military officers in this thing. can't recall ever getting any of their Allied equivalents even.

Probably due to nazi fanboy wikipedia editors: https://www.wired.com/story/one-womans-mission-to-rewrite-nazi-history-wikipedia/

good read, thank you! i kinda figured. on top of Nazi apologism, Wikipedia provides ideal conditions for military nuts and wargame grognards generally. you wanna add crufty detail to some article nobody else is paying attention to? go right ahead! so any article about any battle or military figure is REAMS longer, more pointlessly detailed, more prose-y, and less citation-rich than an encyclopedia article should be. except for bold souls like ms. coffman, nobody edits all this stuff except other military nuts and wargame grognards, and barely anybody else reads it. god help you if you just want to BASICALLY brush up on the Battle of Midway, you could spend a whole afternoon there.

https://spellingbeetimes.com/2022/01/19/new-york-times-nyt-spelling-bee-answers-and-solution-for-january-19-2022/
The word ALIT has no known definition.

i was genuinely surprised it didn't accept HONEYBOOBOO today

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

first QB in some time for me today

Can't usually get to QB, especially without hints. Thus far have resisted the latter, but have this feeling like I must be a word or two away.

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/

i can't fucking win this.

anyway, also this:
https://worldle.teuteuf.fr/

Wow -- I got the hang of it after a while, but Semantle is tough.

wordle - if you've been playing it a while, do 4-letter words + "s" come up much, or even at all? wondering if I can discount those from my guesses? Or is there a list somewhere of all previous answers that doesn't give away future answers...?

the source for wordle has two lists, one of which is all the answers, in sequence, in plain text (!), and there is another list with other valid words in it.

using rot13 so i'm technically not cheating - but spoiler tags for those who feel it's borderline: only 14 answers end in 's' so plurals are rare or nonexistent

thanks! spoiler tags::
Hmmm NOW I think perhaps it is cheating :D I think I just wondered if it was an unwritten rule or something as I noticed they didn't seem to come up despite me trying to eliminate them. I might keep the information to myself

goddamnit enjoy your soon to be exclusive access to wordle you spelling bee weirdos

Wow too bad there aren't like a hundred clones and variants already out there

o wait

there are

It's not going to be paywalled, at least not yet:

https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/31/22911274/wordle-new-york-times-free-word-game-acquisition

Fuck that I'm going back to text twist xp

so here's my friends notes about semantle:

IIRC, word2vec considers words that are found in similar contexts. So,
while red and green might be opposites, we would often see "a red vase"
and "a green vase". But while we might see "he took the stairs to the
second floor" vs "he took the elevator to the second floor", we would
never see "he took the elevation to the second floor". I guess this
can't be all there is too it, because "he took the elevate" is no beter
than "he took the elevation", but that's the intuition.

It's also one new word per day.

The purchase, announced by The Times on Monday, reflects the growing importance of games, like crosswords and Spelling Bee, in the company’s quest to increase digital subscriptions to 10 million by 2025

The weird thing about my attempt at semantle was one of my first guesses was "lift." I didn't mean it in the elevator sense but was surprised it was only 20/100 comparable to "elevator" despite being another term for elevator

word2vec is apparently not good with brit slang?
https://wiki.pathmind.com/word2vec

Lol i tried again today and it is completely impenetrable. Wrote my friend and told him this needs tweaking

yeah i couldn't finish it.

after about 50 guesses, the highest i got was 33.56, couldn't get any closer than that :/ I'm not sure I totally get how it works.

Semantle is killing mw!

I got as far as like 25 points when i did spell... magic didnt work but awhile (as in, "sit a spell") was higher. Am I doing it right?

Oh and yeah it dont like UK/AU spelling either FWIW

The word you’re going for is conceptually connected in a way that makes sense to an algorithm. So today, the closest i got was 30% with
Speedy
Time
virtue

Have now gotten 44.18 similarity with “graciousness” but “grace” was only 30.44. idgi

QB in 8 minutes, personal record

Have now gotten 44.18 similarity with “graciousness” but “grace” was only 30.44. idgi

The best I've managed today is 48.38 with impatience. Totally stuck there, though.

Fittingly.

Got all but one on SB real fast but I had no idea what an otters den was and had to cheat.

OK, got the Semantle in 172 (though many of those were random words just to get the hang of the damn thing). I was halfway there but didn't realize it...

it's gonna be such a nightmare once the original wordle wordlist ends and the ezerskified word list takes over

today as word 228 out of 2315, 5.7 more years before it runs out

I'm going to be real and say that I don't understand the fun of guessing a random ass word without any clues, and kind of think Wordle and its variants are wildly dumb.

And like, I love word games. I just don't think it's fun, at all.

doing the same thing using 6-letter words and using /usr/share/dict/words as a source would give you 15066 words, but they include things like zythum and zonule and worrit and wummel (and 'wordle'!)

but... you get clues. you narrow down based on the letters that have already been evaluated, using your knowledge of English words as well as the process of elimination. it's basically a word-game form of the popular game "Clue."

it's exactly the popular game "word mastermind" but with 5 letter words

it still comes down to just guessing the correct word
any strategy is just to ensure you get the most clues out of the words you supply

which is why i prefer absurdle - you are playing against an algorithm
and you are actually _playing_, not just guessing

for guessing i still prefer the good ol spelling bee

I dunno, maybe it's too open-ended for me. I like this game TypeShift, love Apelli

Lol sorry dumb thumbs

I love Spelling Bee, love the TypeShift game, but when I have to guess the letters rather than make words from those that are pre-selected and given to me, I completely lose interest.

Yeah tbr Wordle is NOT a word game, its more of a number/strategy pattern game.

“wordle is not even a real word!” - sam

It's actually a roguelike

can't see how ppl would stand over the Sam ezerzky personal daily "this word counts because I say so Nyan" puzzle but take issue with wordle as not a real word puzzle tbh

and I like both ftr

ye sure now it's not because one is popular