NYT Spelling Bee drives me crazy

Yes, I wrote a program to scrape them all, I’ve got a summarized database of 1,684 now. :slight_smile:

Cool.

I got a pangram first try today. My gripe for the day is that they didn’t allow bitcoin.

I finally found one of the pangrams (though not the perfect one), about twenty words in.

Yep, as I noted a few posts above. I wonder, however, if the plural would be accepted.

Oops, missed that.

It took me forever to find any of the pangrams; I was around 25 words in when I found the perfect one.

And my least favorite tree, BAOBAB
strikes yet again. What annoys me even more is that I’d forgotten all about it and had to resort to a clue to find it.

I hate it when that happens. (More often, the older I get.)

Got a pangram as my first word again today, and got to Genius without resorting to clues, which doesn’t happen all that often. The word that put me over the top was epode, which I dredged up out of some dim crossword memory.

Speaking of crosswords, it’s annoying that Sam appears to filter based on his perception of commonality, but still includes an archaic (but very crossword-y) word like

tope…….

Or doth.

It’s not about the words that should be there, but about guessing what Sam has picked to include today.

Still no HOOPOE. Also, given the pangram, I’m surprising that HOPHEAD wasn’t allowed.

Or POPTOP.

Haven’t been kicked off the site yet, so will keep going until they notice.

I noticed those omissions and wasn’t happy.

Speaking of archaic, why is doth not allowed, but doeth is? Totally illogical. :enraged_face:

I only got the latter (my last word before QB) by randomly trying combinations. I wasn’t even thinking of that word, and was stunned when it worked.

They were both accepted for me.

D’oh! Brain fart.

[Emily Litella] Never mind[/EL]

I’ve (more-or-less) stopped getting angry at this. I do still morbidly try to find a day where the crossword and Spelling Bee disagree about what’s a word. RIATA or REATA I think, and maybe ADIT, which seemed to be in the crossword every other day there for a while, but I don’t remember seeing it recently. I still get annoyed by UN. Why is this UN-thing there, but that UN-thing isn’t? It means you have to try everything.

I doubt Sam built up the word list word by word, so even he doesn’t know exactly what’s there. I do think he does some curation though. I remember being 1 point away from Queen Bee and spending half an hour typing in every combo that seemed possible. It turned out to be DACE, an obscure fish from the North Atlantic. That’s since been removed. I’m also pretty sure LORRY has been added.

Similar to UN- is DE-

Lorry has been accepted from the beginning, though I’m not sure why. There are plenty of Britishisms that aren’t allowed.