Two more steps - filter out archaic, obscure, or highly technical terms that most players wouldn’t have fun with. Check to make sure that the score range is acceptable. I’m guessing they wouldn’t want either too many or too few available points. If the maximum available points is out of bounds, pick a different center letter and try again.
A Spelling Bee word has a minimum of 4 letters.
Also filter out any objectionable words: the standard taboo words (curse and sexually explicit words) plus the new taboo words (racial epithets). If I were running it, there would be a word list that has only acceptable words, so this step would not be needed. The whole thing could be automated with only a perfunctory review before publication. And based on the words that consistantly don’t show up, I’m fairly sure they have done this.
Personally, I think they went a bit too far in removing technical/obscure terms. I have a longish list of words that are not obscure to me, but do not show up in the puzzles. OK, not all those belong in the puzzles, but I think some do. One is an outright error, which I’d expect to have been fixed by now. So as far as I can tell, they’ve never changed their word list. At least not in the last year, which is how long I’ve been playing.
The rules for the Sunday puzzle in the Times are different. Five or more letters only and you don’t get credit for length. A bingo (pangram) counts as three. The example I gave was from last Sunday. But the basic idea of the construction remains.
That’s interesting. I’ve been doing it almost every day for a couple of months and never noticed that Sunday was any different.
The online one isn’t different on Sunday. That’s only the print version.
This has been answered for German and this link has been posted previously, but I’m reposting to mention that French doesn’t have separate tiles with diacritics.
I was curious if this corresponds to alphabetizing rules in those languages, and it does not.