If you don’t like compound words, you might want to skip Sunday’s puzzle because there are lots of them.
Also, it’s not very consistent about which words ending in -ABLE it accepts, so you just have to try them all. Which is annoying.
It’s not that I don’t like compound words; it’s just annoying that one is accepted while another is not.
Agreed. Like CLICKABLE being accepted while KICKABLE is not. And CALLABLE today is an accepted compound word that I’ve never heard used.
I wanted to use billback, but no go.
I’ve never head of it either, but it has a specific usage in the financial industry as a demand for payment. Mirriam Webster’s example sentence:
Some investors had speculated that the $1.1 billion note is structured as a callable bond,
And this is an illustration of which words are accepted and which are not when it comes to suffixes (-able is really a suffix for these words, not part of a compound word) and prefixes such as non- and un-. Only affixed words where there’s a meaning that goes beyond the simple meaning of the affix. Why? Because dictionaries need to explicitly have an entry for them, whereas they usually skip entries for the others. And computer word lists, including the one used for this game, are based on dictionaries.
Are there any other word games similar to Spelling Bee out there? I once tried to find some, but came up empty. You’d think there’d be copycat games around somewhere.
Yes, someone posted one awhile back, let me look…
I just played SpellsBee, and even though its format is just like Spelling Bee, at the bottom of the page it has a disclaimer: “SpellsBee.com is not affiliated with “Spelling Bee” by NYTimes in any way”.
It struck me as easier than Spelling Bee, for which I almost always need a hint for the last few words. I found all 40 possible SpellsBee words without hints, which it doesn’t provide anyway.
Yeah, it’s different - they accept different words than Spelling Bee, for one. It’s kind of a pale imitation, but it’s something, I guess.
There are links at the bottom of the page to a Strands clone and a Squares game (a word search). The Strands game didn’t work right - it didn’t format to my cell phone screen very well, and there were scattered letters left over.
I also just played it. It obviously uses its own word list. It has some words not in the NYT game and doesn’t accept others that are in it. It also doesn’t seem to have a Queen Bee equivalent.
Holy cow, one of today’s words is properly obscure. I had to read several clues to find it, as it was the last outstanding one. Never heard of it before.
And yet MECHANE was not on the list (which any Order of the Stick fan will know). And LIANA once again failed to appear yesterday.
Which word? (Blur it, of course.) We stop at Genius, so may not have gotten it.
It’s NANKEEN. Which according to Spelling Bee Buddy only 19% have managed to find.
Nankeen is yet another lol just kidding word. It’s been acceptable seven times after being disallowed the first four times it was playable.
I certainly don’t doubt this statement, but out of idle curiosity, how do you know this stat?
This site. Click on the ‘History’ tab and enter any word used in the NYT Spelling Bee. Or not used.
Edit: Just reloaded the page w/o my adblocker on and it’s a bit ad happy.
Yeah, that was super annoying, considering words it won’t accept.
Listen, Sam, that word is also a verb, which means it has a past tense. I know because I looked it up.