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

also, faintly british word not accepted

Yes I was disappointed, but I guess it's somewhat rude. But, balanced out by the S.

idk which one you're thinking of but there's a kitchen-related British word that isn't allowed, which is what i assumed abanana was thinking of. i was a little surprised but I guess it's true that Americans don't use that word really ever

Ok I thought it was bollocks! What's the one you're referring to?

--> HOBS

leee got it

lol okay well that's a VERY british word. weirdly SB accepts LORRY now though so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

CRUMPETS damn

STIFFUPPERLIP fuck

BOSOMMANOR damn

GUVNA godDAMmit

I thought today's one was pretty straightforward
I don't anyone who does Spelling Bee in real life so everybody thinks I'm crazy when I talk about it
I am mildly obsessed though - I'm up to 177 consecutive Genius+ scores

today's was interesting in that it included an S for only the second time ever in my experience, and I forgot to think of three-letter words that in plural end in S

Bobs, Boos, Cobs, Lobs, Sobs

So... no TURGOR (pressure)? No GUARANA? has anyone checked on Sam in awhile? is he okay?

have they cut the number of words they will let you enter on this before it tells you that you need to pay to continue? It only let me do two today, but one of them was ORANGUTAN which I was happy about

I think it's a max number of points, so if you get a high scoring word early it cuts you off early

Also no ARGAN today, sorry we're fresh out

I enjoyed this one. Some really fun pangrams in there

Is anyone playing the NYT scrabble knock-off?

I have been enjoying it with pals (and happy to play vs folks here should anyone be keen)

BUT!!! I just accepted a game from a rando and this total freak is playing the wildest fuckin words - in quick succession I have had GROSZ, YAMUNS (to make GROSZY) and now VERSOS

i feel like i am tripping, and also suspect my opponent of using AI to suggest the highest value move for every tray - which is an exciting new way for AI to be shit and boring that I hadn’t previously considered

I've heard of verso, fwiw (it's a thing in printing).

yeah and i do think the wild and loose (and seemingly arbitrary) word list is kinda part of the fun of the NYT games extended universe - but the percentage of unusual words in this game was deeply sus

anyway this story has a happy ending and i won on the last turn clearing my tray to make DILATION for 79, a move so satisfying i need to shamelessly share it with an indifferent internet

Well now they've introduced a new achievement that will change the way I play the game (i.e. badges, and specifically the PG first badges).

I was already always playing to get pangrams first so when the badges thing popped up I’d already earned the 150 badge in that category.
The thing to see all badges isn’t working for me so I don’t know if I have any others

Yeah I couldn't see all the badges at first but after I manually updated my app, they were there.

Figuring out the pangram first is sometimes easy, but when there are multiple pangrams it's more difficult.

It would be interesting if they had a badge for getting all of the 4-letter words first, since those seem to be the most vexing in getting to queen bee.

I try to go through each starting letter to get them all first, but there are always many I end up leaving out. You would think it would be easy, but I've never gotten them all at the beginning, and often it's a 4-letter word that is the last one I think of

I've been doing the LA Times' Wordflower, which is the same game, but it seems to be a little harder. I don't think you need an LA Times subscription to do it (but you have to watch an ad first). It gives hints by offering you additional letters if you ask for them, but it also has a different and sometimes arcane choice of words. I don't often get to 'expert' (the equivalent of 'genius') without a little help

I've never played the official game but recently I found a free version at spellsbee.com. The letter choices are often annoying (ING four times in a row this week), very common words aren't recognised (linguini), and queen bee is basically impossible as there's always at least one word no-one would ever know (recently there was something like chge or chbe). I'm still addicted though.

I use that too. It has an unlimited mode so it's an endless time waster.

Glad to see BITCOIN is not in the word list

^^^

Good lord at today's hard Pips.

Yeah it was bonkers but I got there by trial and error.

I put them in at semi-random and it somehow worked out on my first try lol

same lol, got it in under 3 mins and I didn’t even bother adding up the total for the big one

OPPUGN?! Seriously, Sam?

I thought I had a good pangram today with proroguing, but it was not accepted. Then again I'm in Canada and maybe they don't use this word in the USA.

um....????

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicane

I’ve been complaining about the absence of that one for literally years.

Man, I was about to come here and complain LOUDLY about the absence of a particular word today but then double checked and realized I was spelling it wrong like a nincompoop.

Yesterday's puzzle included "male cat's moob" as a forum hint.

OK OK Sam - AROAR is a fucking answer in today’s crossword and you have decided it’s not a word for SB purposes? Shaking my fist in your general direction, wherever that is.

gtfo with PFFT

Wtaf Sam

Got our 1,000 pangrams badge today, another “pangram first” notch and our 49th queen bee. Feeling pretty good

Speaking of PG first, I pretty much had to cheat twice over to get today's: first checked the hints on Buddy, then had to look in a dictionary to figure out the spelling.

I faintly remembered it being a word and was very pleasantly surprised at spelling it correctly on my first try

smh at the lack of INCEPT(ED)

I woke up from my post-turkey nap with the pangram found by my snoozing brain. Yay genius, now I can stop.

haha mookie i wanted that one.

this game is so weird, i had a similar experience--spent a chunk of time this morning doing everything but the pangram. went to thanksgiving, had several drinks, opened it up again just now and got the pangram instantly.

feel like there can't be too many pangrams where it's the only word to start with that letter

yeah it was a good one, so many common words/patterns that have nothing to do with the pangram

Good on Sam for accepting rando today.