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

Tracer and Lee OTM. Some really annoying spellings in yesterday’s.

ah DICKHEAD would have made an excellent pangram

yeah i was a lil bummed. sam ezersky felt seen lol

Good lord at today's second PG.

counterpoint: it was, in fact, good

Some PG

somehow it came to me, no idea how

Did Sam change the scoring tiers? Today's QB total is 2x Amazing -- it used to be Genius, right?

No it’s always been 2x (or 2x-1) Amazing

Doh, you're right; I think they added QB to the scoring tiers, and I just reflexively looked at the second-highest rank (Genius).

the very last word i got in order to reach QB today i have never in my life seen spelled that way. raise your standards sam!!!!

I thought today's words were very ordinary

This one? https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=dopy%2Cdopey&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3

lol indeed that's the one. cmon now

the last word I got was ropy. It's always the 4 letter words that get you

i have been doing this for the past few weeks and today was the first time i absolutely lost it, no idea what is wrong with diluvian or at minimum diluvial

The latter seems like a mistake, especially with al- being accepted.

Dipping is a word and no amount of pretending you’re friends with a guy will change the fact that a word game that doesn’t know words is crap

It showed up in my word list though?

I might be misremembering the common word that annoyed me today

i do wonder about the reasons for excluding GODLING, it's not like it's that obscure

surprised DOGPILING wasn't accepted

I have never seen or heard of the word godling and am not surprised they didn't accept dogpiling, but isn't dinging a word, as in the gerund of the word to criticize?

I like the spelling bees where -ing is a possiblity, I can usually get most of those words, today the hardest word for me was diploid

the word in your first paragraph was accepted for me

I don't know why I started playing this again, it takes up way too much time!

For those of you who don't want to break the striking NYT tech guild's picket line, I'm enjoying this clone:

https://bee.ignoble.dev

Click on the beehive at the top to play.

The other thing you can do of course is go to the main NYT spelling bee page, write down the hexagons and letters on a piece of paper and solve it the old fashioned way, the way my mom and I used to do with the Sunday magazine version. I find this method very soothing, and you get to be the judge of whether a word counts or not

Re; that clone it has some nice features - it progresses from fewer words to more words throughout the week; it has stats “spoilers” if you need a clue; IT INCLUDES THE LETTER S FROM TIME TO TIME

sadly there is no login so it does not sync between devices

https://nytimesguild.org/tech/guild-builds/

These are games that the striking workers created to tide us addicts over

I tried some of those but to my mind they mainly seem to prove that a good game needs more than just technical staff

look i'm not proud

https://bsky.app/profile/beefilth.bsky.social

COEVAL wasn’t accepted yesterday

no matter how many times i punched it in!

NIGGLY also apparently not a word

Very INGy one yesterday, raced to AMAZING in it felt like 3 mins and then spent ages finding the last couple I needed to hit genius

2500th today! A special letter gets included.

no fucking way.

Never thought this would happen.

somehow the world has not ended!

I was mildly pleased to see foosball worked

Love it when the pangram is my favourite Depeche Mode album

That album is in the air at the moment. It's turning 35 in a few days and was featured on both CBC music and BBC 6 music last week.

repeating pangram/letter combo just two days apart, what’s up with that?

Dumb April Fools joke?

An illuminating group interview with a few of the regular hint writers: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/01/crosswords/spelling-bee-hints.html

See, this would have been a fine April 1st: I did not expect to spend some of my morning wondering whether WIGGINGLY was a word.

Today's PG is bad.

I may have to give this game up as it's starting to be a bit of an obsession.
I've managed to get two Queen Bees in the past week. I've not been able to give up until I've got at least genius for the past three weeks or so

hopefully the 32% increase will get some of you to stop supporting these traitorous collaborators