And sometimes that fish becomes fat, aka podgy.
Okay, that last one is a Britishism. I did try both though.
And today it accepted poop but not poopy.
The word dopy is testament to the weirdness of Mr. Ezersky.
The word has been playable five times since the Bee began. It was accepted in 2019 and 2020, then randomly disallowed in 2021, and then back in favor in 2023 and 2024. Consistency is not prized by the constructors.
You want weirdness in what words are accepted: neither piny nor piney are accepted, but pinny is. I’m assuming this is an error, since according to M-W, that last word is a shortening of pinnafore but it’s British.
We wore pinnies most days in gym class. USA.
But of course, this being Sam, piney was accepted the first time it appeared and booted the next. (It’s only been playbable twice.)
The work coition is used less commonly than coital. If a word is accepted, then the game can’t be won unless that word is played. That’s not to say he doesn’t use plenty of words more obscure than that.
The population of Thailand is 9.5 times as large as Hungary, and there is a sizeable Thai population living in the US, would be my guess.
Argue with Mr Merriam and Mr Webster:
It says “chiefly” British, and then all six examples are from American periodicals.
Those are recent examples from the internet. The definition is unchanged from my 20-year-old M-W Collegiate, so they weren’t what the definition was based on.
Coition is a noun, coital is an adjective. And, as you say, it’s not as obscure as other words that have been used.
Yeah, I was going to use coitus as being the more common form of the noun, but it contains an S so can’t be included in the Bee, so no doubt someone would quibble over that. Either way, Sam has odd notions of what’s common and what’s uncommon.
No matter where these discussions go, I always have to compare to the fact that Sam accepts RATATAT, a word that even MW hyphenates.
RATATAT comes up possibly more often than any other 7-letter word. If the puzzle has an A, R and T, one of which is the index letter, you can just automatically fill in ATTAR, RATATAT, TART, and TARTAR.
Yes, I call that the “axis of RATATAT” for reasons that are unclear to even myself.
Yeah, that one is truly baffling.
Argh. Once again today LANAI is fine but LIANA is not.
Also not: VIAND, DILUVIAN, DILUVIAL (blurred because they’re close enough to other words).
And a fun word I’ve only learned because it appears in the Spelling Bee frequently turns up again: LUNULA.
I was coming here to complain about exactly those four words that are lacking.
I was proud of myself for remembering that word but then needed a hint to get vandal.