For a word game that’s all about having a large vocabulary of obscure words, it makes no sense for it to randomly exclude perfectly ordinary obscure words. “Our word list does not include words that are offensive, obscure, hyphenated or proper nouns.” Okay, having a list of offensive words that don’t count, fine. Hyphenated and proper nouns, fine, perfectly typical for this sort of thing. Obscure? WTF?
The first time I ran in to this that I recall was ‘abattoir’, which isn’t even all that obscure. NOT IN WORD LIST. Why not? Who knows. It’s “obscure.” Today was ‘tappet’ (component in the valve train of an engine) AND ‘patten’ (wooden overshoe or clog). NOT IN WORD LIST. There have been plenty of others in the past that I don’t recall. I just don’t understand. Patten is admittedly pretty obsolete, but tappet is a perfectly ordinary word for an object that is owned by the vast majority of the games players.
I’m not even very good at the game, and I don’t subscribe so I don’t ever get to play very long, but it’s just thoroughly annoying.
I agree, the game is ridiculously inconsistent. It doesn’t take a number of perfectly ordinary words, and then it will take the occasional word that is quite obscure or something I’d consider foreign. Recently it took “daphne” which I guess is a small Eurasian shrub. Right, not obscure at all.
At first the inconsistency pissed me off, but now I just accept it. Don’t think of it as a dictionary-related game, where all words in the dictionary that fit are correct and acceptable. It’s more like a guessing game or crossword puzzle, where it’s not about the legitimacy of a word per se, it’s simply a case of “is that word an answer to this puzzle?”
Once you take that approach, it’s a lot less annoying. Also, since there is no penalty for trying words that don’t work, just go ahead and type things you think might be acceptable. I’ve gotten plenty of words that way, without even knowing the meaning. Or thinking, “this shouldn’t work but I’ll try it anyway” - that’s how I got daphne, which to me is a proper noun (autocorrect agrees and keeps trying to capitalize it).
The fact British words aren’t accepted is also frustrating. “Lorry” is one that comes to mind, but there are others. C’mon, Sam, what reader who is educated enough to be playing a NYT word game doesn’t know the word “lorry,” even if they’ve never set foot in England? It’s very inconsistent.
I agree. I tried “tappet” today, too. Other words they don’t accept include lanai, lorry, and one or two other British isms. (Of course, now that I’m trying I can’t remember other unacceptable words.)
[ETA: Ninja’ed on lorry! But I remembered another: nappy.)
What’s also annoying is that, although you can email them with suggestions to add words, they only reply with a form letter thanking you. There’s no indication I’ve seen that they actually add words based on these suggestions.
And what they consider non-obscure and accept is also a bit odd sometimes. The list means strongly toward haute cuisine terminology and ornithology. You can expect to find any form of pasta ever invented in the word list.
And do you know what “nene” means? I didn’t either before a few years ago. But it’s worth one point any time there’s an N and an E in the puzzle.
The problem with that word is that it in the US it is also used to describe Black hair. AIUI, while Black Americans can use it, it’s considered offensive when used by others. So I get leaving that one out.
Still, most of the time my son was in nappies - I mean diapers, I guess - we lived in Mozambique and often shopped in South Africa, so to me the word is totally natural and has nothing to do with racism.
ETA: paging @MrDibble, who is both South African and a staunch opponent of racist speech. Thoughts on that word?
ANOTHER ETA: It takes lanai! In fact it shows up a lot. That word, and nene, are very common in my milieu, since I live in Hawai’i where no one says “porch” and there are “nene crossing” signs here and there. So I usually see them, and know for sure that lanai is one of the words it takes. But there are other well known Hawaiian words (maybe aloha? I can’t remember now) that it rejects.
I don’t think I knew ‘nene’ until I started doing the Bee, but it is the official state bird of Hawaii, so…
They did change the status of one word, so somebody’s complaint got through. I wish I could remember which one; I would reflexively try it and one day it was finally accepted.
I play daily, and once I’ve reached “Genius,” I check the prior day’s answers.
Invariably there is a word I’ve never seen so I am comforted that I couldn’t have got “Queen Bee,” (though I have, a handful of times). Sometimes I remember a few for the future.
Today that meant I got “pitapat” and both “tepee” and “teepee,” (surprisingly not considered un-PC). Penman/man and Apeman/men are also ones I knew to use.
Once I think I got QB when I tried “pfft” needing one more point (or so I surmised - that unstated total is somewhat random, too).
Agree with the OP, it is fun (now sort of an obsession to keep the streak going) but the inconsistency of what counts is really frustrating.
Nene is one of those words that often come up in the NYT crossword puzzle. And yes, the Spelling Bee seems to exclude words that I can recognize. Today, for instance, I tried the word “pima”, which is a type of cotton.
BTW what is your feeling on using the hints? I do, after a while. For instance if I know that today’s a bingo, I will try harder to think of words starting with all seven letters.
I don’t use the hints but I will open a browser to type a word I’ve tried to see if I’m misspelled it and often find I haven’t, they are legit words that they don’t count.
I usually look for the panagram first but often it it the last one I get to reach Genius, like this week with mandolin. Once the last word was marijuana, which should have come to mind much sooner given I was high at the time.
A couple of times recently they’ve had a perfect pangram with the central letter right in the middle. I kind of wonder if they started with the word and used the letters in it.
Spelling Bee will frequently not accept words that regularly show up in the NYT crossword, which is frustrating. And other times they’ve had words that I tried to look up later in dictionary.com and couldn’t find a definition. So yeah their definition of “obscure” is questionable.
For a long time it wouldn’t accept “afro” but I think they finally added that to their word list.
They claim not to use variant spellings of words, but they do it all the time - tepee/teepee, bandana/bandanna, omelet/omelette, nunchuk/nunchuk, vaxed/vaxxed, mezze/meze, yente/yenta, canceled/cancelled, etc.
I have a LONG list of words that should be allowed but aren’t. Abattoir is on it. So is dado, bolded, cavitate, cardoon, davit, exigent, cyclonic, fatted, flatted, felted, gantlet, hipped, iodide, lienee, marl, milfoil, myoma, naphtha, muriatic, milo, nacelle, place, puppeted, rugrat, rarify, prion, tung, veining, and many many more.
It’s just so weird. Why would Sam (the puzzle author) bother to curate the acceptable word list for obscure words? Why not just use a standard dictionary (like, say, the official Scrabble dictionary) and delete anything potentially offensive? It just seems like a hell of a lot of work to go through every word in the language and decide if it counts as obscure. And how does that improve the puzzle, even if we were all to agree with Sam as to what counts as obscure? Why, oh why, oh why?
Agreed! A lot of the words that aren’t accepted are not even remotely obscure. Tung oil? Forward nacelle? Fatted calf? Dado joint? Is he just too lazy to update his database? He surely gets emails every day from annoyed players. It’s a running commentary on the community board linked at the puzzle.
My partner and I have an established method: we play independently (and competitively - we’ll ask each other “how many words/points do you have so far?” and whoever is ahead will cackle evilly) with no hints up until we both reach genius. Then, we compare and share words.
At that point we usually only have 3-5 words to go. We’ll then look at the “spelling bee buddy” and do whatever it takes to find the missing words, but with as few aids as possible. We use things like bestwordlist.com, but an anagram solver is the very last resort - I don’t think we have turned to that method in the last couple of months.
But, we will do whatever it takes to finish off the puzzle. So yes, we use hints and internet tools at the very end.
The last puzzle was unusually brutal - neither one of us made it to genius and when we pooled our words there were still 15 left to find. That was highly unusual.
I did the exact same thing with a friend during the lockdowns and all of 2020. Every night on the phone we’d take turns reading the words we had for each letter. Then we’d use the hints at the NYTimes spelling bee forum to make Queen Bee. (And Queen Bee really should have its own triumphant completion sound clip, like the puzzle. A fanfare, perhaps.) If we couldn’t finish, we’d look up the answers on the various websites that carry them.
It was amiably competitive. Did you Queen? she’d ask me, suspiciously, if I seemed even a little bit smug. I think the Bee helped keep us both sane during that strange time. I miss it, in some ways.
