2500th Spelling Bee: March 12, 2025
The Spelling Bee of March 12, 2025 was the 2500th regular Bee puzzle published since the online Spelling Bee had its début on May 9, 2018.
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On March 11, the Bee editor Sam Ezersky put out a teaser on Instagram that the 2500th Bee would have something special: [transcript:] “What surprise do you think is in tomorrow’s Bee? I’ve got a special announcement for the #hivemind community. And that is, you oughta solve tomorrow’s puzzle; it is something special, spectacular, stupendous, and dare I say it? Surprising!”
The opening screen of the March 12 Bee is shown at right, with Spelling Bee mascot Beeatrice surrounded by animated celebratory fizziness.
The opening screen of the March 12 Bee is shown at right, with Spelling Bee mascot Beeatrice surrounded by animated celebratory fizziness.
Also shown at right is the puzzle itself, with that first-ever S and the FABULOUS pangram.
Just about half of the words in this puzzle – 23 of 43 – included the letter S. And only 17 of the 43 were made by tacking the S on to the end of a noun or verb.
It will be interesting to see if the inclusion of letter S is a singular event or a permanent addition. Can E+R be waiting in the wings? Surely if we can handle ING and E+D we can manage E+R!
In addition to the novelty afforded by the inclusion of the letter S, this Bee offered 24 new words for the Bee lexicon.
In addition to the novelty afforded by the inclusion of the letter S, this Bee offered 24 new words for the Bee lexicon.
After the puzzle dropped, Sam Ezersky offered another video message on Threads: [transcript] “Hi everybody, it’s your friendly neighborhood SB editor Sam Ezersky here. You all gotta try today’s puzzle. It’s the first in the digital Spelling Bee’s history to contain the letter S. Plurals are a thing now, guys! All 25 other letters have been included at least once, twice, ten plus times. But never the letter S, because, well, plurals can be tedious, you don’t want the puzzle to be too big, I don’t know. We have shied away from this, and at this point, it’s kind of a meme. But that all changes today. So you all might be wondering, are you going to need to solve this puzzle any differently than normal? I’d say no, on the whole, but one tip or trick I might have to offer is, let’s say you find a noun: Don’t forget to tack on an S at the end if it doesn’t have the S in it. Some words you might find might come in twos, the singular and the plural. So don’t forget, if you do one, do the other along the way. Now, are we ever gonna see another puzzle with the S in it? So, I can say— Hold on, I’m getting another call, gotta run!”
In the March 12 edition of their daily newsletter, the New York Times highlighted the special puzzle with this paragraph: “Every day for the past seven years, Sam Ezersky, the editor of The Times’s Spelling Bee, has scrambled 25 letters for millions of solvers. Today, for the 2,500th digital puzzle, he did something he’d never done before: He included S. As regular players know, S is a fraught letter for the Bee, given its potential to increase the word count. The puzzle … has a pangram to match the occasion. ‘Rather than a random word with an S, I wanted to pick a good fun word,’ Sam said.”
Also on March 12, The New York Times issued a news release about the special puzzle, with more insights from Sam Ezersky, including this: “Spelling Bee would not have reached the success it has today without the community discussion and passion from the NYT Games community. This special puzzle is a ‘thank you’ to the community who has asked for this and I hope will continue to push Spelling Bee forward to more milestones to come.” And on April 6, The New York Times published "Spelling Bee Lets Solvers Have Plurals (for One Day)," a "Times Insider" article about this special Spelling Bee puzzle.
Also on March 12, The New York Times issued a news release about the special puzzle, with more insights from Sam Ezersky, including this: “Spelling Bee would not have reached the success it has today without the community discussion and passion from the NYT Games community. This special puzzle is a ‘thank you’ to the community who has asked for this and I hope will continue to push Spelling Bee forward to more milestones to come.” And on April 6, The New York Times published "Spelling Bee Lets Solvers Have Plurals (for One Day)," a "Times Insider" article about this special Spelling Bee puzzle.
