Unlikely.
I mean, any adventure story taking place in a tropical rainforest will inevitably mention lianas, even if no one is swinging from them.
LIANA has been refused 73 times, and never accepted. Interestingly, on the NYT’s own puzzle detail page it is not listed under words that are in the dictionary, but not included…time to get a new dictionary!
My bugbear along those lines is ACTINIC. It’s a perfectly cromulent word, but it’s never been accepted.
That said, today’s (5 August) SB was one of the simplest I’ve experienced. Helps that I do know a couple of long-ish obscure words that fit the letters.
Or this one, although at least it wasn’t hours this time. But it was the last word found.
Also: Sam doesn’t like cute furry animals but apparently he does like ballet.
Today’s pangram is a doozy. I have certainly never heard of it, and just thought, well, this looks like it could be a word, and I don’t know how else I’m going to get a J in there with the rest of them. I was shocked when it worked.
Exact same!
Me too. Desperately making up words like
BANTAMJET.
Disappointed but not surprised that (lowercase) “batman” isn’t accepted. Too British.
Always worth a try (or so I tell myself).
I tried batman as well. And yes, the pangram today was really obscure (as was
battement
and I think the letter
j
only appeared twice.
I thought the word is batsmen?
From Wikipedia, “a batman or orderly is a soldier or airman assigned to a commissioned officer as a personal servant.” It’s a British term.
Ah. I was thinking of a cricket term.
I actually had to do a search using Steve’s definition to get the pangram. Never heard or seen that word in my life.
Same on both counts.
I got it through sheer dumb luck, taking a four letter root and patching on prefixes and suffixes.
Agreed(!) on the second count.
I got to G without the pangram and I don’t think I will given the comments here. I played around a bit with plausible sounding words but no luck so far. I should probably get on with my day
Now Batman isn’t a word?, British Officer’s servants and Homer Simpson will be so disappointed.
To the Bat-dictionary, Robin!
Got to QB. I needed a hint (but not the Buddy) to get the word @Dewey_Finn posted. That was pretty obscure and was the only word I needed a hint for.