"Of course I read the comments!"
On November 21, 2024, Sam Ezersky, editor of the New York Times Spelling Bee, was the guest of the Los Angeles-based Writers’ Bloc for an informal talk and some interesting Q & A from the audience. LexiConnexxions transcribed the portions of the hour-long presentation that might be of interest to Spelling Bee solvers.
An evening with Sam Ezersky, the Digital Puzzles Editor for the New York Timespresented in LA by Writers' Bloc on November 21, 2023.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLaeXF72r-A 1 hour, 8 minutes. Machine-generated transcript at the YT link.Description of the event here: https://writersblocpresents.com/main/sam-ezersky/
NOTE In the material below, text that is “enclosed in quotes” is a verbatim or near-verbatim transcription of participants’ words; materials not enclosed in quotes are our paraphrases or condensations. Text enclosed by [square brackets] within quoted material is our clarification, condensation, correction, etc. (We edited out the several thousand instances of the words “like,” “just” and “you know.”)
NOTE In the material below, text that is “enclosed in quotes” is a verbatim or near-verbatim transcription of participants’ words; materials not enclosed in quotes are our paraphrases or condensations. Text enclosed by [square brackets] within quoted material is our clarification, condensation, correction, etc. (We edited out the several thousand instances of the words “like,” “just” and “you know.”)
Re: Creating each Spelling Bee puzzle
Host: “How do you pick your letters [for Spelling Bee] every day?”SE: “Very carefully. … I start with the pangram; that’s the linchpin of the whole puzzle. … Picking the center letter in particular is a matter of [choosing the one that will yield the best word list; E will yield too many, V too few…] Start with the pangram, figure out a good center letter, and … it’s just vibes.”
Q: Do you use AI?SE: “I have a database at my disposal [of merged lexicons to identify possible pangrams] … “There are so many pangrams that I do a lot of dumpster diving. … What I like to do is find a good mix of pangrams or okay pangrams, but there [are] other merits for puzzle. I work in week batches… I look in a given Monday through Sunday time frame [to ask] Is this a good set of seven? So, today’s puzzle was kind of stacked against yesterday’s, and all the way through the remainder of the week I’m always trying to offer a good bit of variety, because I know – and we will certainly get to this – throughout the hive mind you all have so many different things you like (and dislike!) about your Spelling Bee puzzles, so I really and truly-- at the heart of everything I do is to offer something fun and enjoyable for truly everybody out there, whether you are an ardent Queen Bee player on your own or through the Spelling Bee Buddy, whether you are learning the English language by playing this game, whether you are simply striving to beat your previous time taken to get to Amazing in a single day. There are so many different ways to play this game.”
Re: The Spelling Bee Forum
SE: “Hivemind’s got some powerful, um, powerful [unintelligible]Host: “A lot of the people in the Hive… Do any of you [audience] read the comments? [audience signals yes; SE raises hand and grins] [Host to SE:] Can we talk about that, Sam? [It’s the] best part. I do read the comments once in a while and sometimes they’re a little loony. [SE signals “not that bad!”] How do you… oh, severe, severe. They’re a little bit tough.”SE: “Passionate.”Host: “Oh, passionate. Okay.”SE: “Passionate. OK, how do I cope?”Host: “Yeah, cope.”SE: “As clichéd as it sounds, [but] I truly mean this, with great something comes great responsibility. … If I want to remain ironclad in my own philosophies, decisions, or what I like in a word game, then I am doing a disservice to truly everybody out there… So, the good, the bad, and the ugly it really all comes with the territory…”
SE: “Of course I read the comments, I read the tweets, I can’t help myself … I think it makes this game better… I want this game to live and breathe with its audience … that’s part of what makes Spelling Bee and all our games great, is that there’s that humanness to the game, its imperfections and all.”
Re: Perceptions of Common and Uncommon Words
Host: “Everybody wants to know: You say as a disclaimer on the website [?] I think it’s on the hints page that some of the definitions or some of the acceptable words are quirky, I mean that your limitations can be quirky. … We’re not going to talk about individual words that we insist are words…As I was emailing you, grumbling—”SE: “Are you a birdwatcher too?”Host: “No. So how do you decide?”SE: “My guiding philosophy is that One person’s wheelhouse – personal background, really, and if we get on a deeper level like personal identity -- could be perceived as another person’s esoterica or just flat-out unfamiliarity... So my goal is asking myself, what feels fair for this wide-ranging audience? [and] that question is inherently flawed because I have my own biases and perceptions too…”
Re: relative commonness of Bee words: “I don’t think [that] I or any one person can prescribe [sic] commonness, so I always – I don’t chortle, I’m not menacing – but when somebody says in the comments that “This is not a common word” or “Here’s a much more common word,” I think to myself [that] there are some cases that are more arguable than others, but I say to myself, well, that’s one take, and there might be a gazillion other people who make that take, too, and maybe I have the wrong take today. I’m happy to have the wrong take… I’m tiptoeing around all this because everybody has what they do and don’t know, even if that’s one word versus that’s two words, or something like that.”
“My more methodical process is that I have multiple dictionaries; I mostly favor M-W online and the Apple on the Mac and that pulls from New Oxford American; [those are] my two major ones. I’d say the Apple one in particular helps me [decide] the more arbitrary cases about [whether to] allow an “unword” or not.
He uses Google news tab a lot to look at contemporaneous use of words in question: Was a word used in an article that is not a specialist publication? He may select “vocabulary words” that may not be in common parlance but might be good synonyms for more common words.
Host re: words as personal identify -- challah, yenta [which spelling of yente, he says?] Host: Tell us about an embarrassing moment re: hive.SE: [Story about having left COPE out of a pandemic-era puzzle (Oct 2020?) – “I didn’t know what to do with myself”] [also told about when CLICKBAIT was omitted – see NYT story on that[
Does the Bee get harder as the week goes by?
Host: Does SB get harder as we progress through the week?SE: I don’t know any more. Originally set out to have it random, so solvers will come back every day. Some like longer puzzles, some like shorter. [He might] put the longer puzzles or those with tougher pangram (“something a little on the technical side”) toward the weekend – “I might put that on a Friday or Saturday more than on a Monday when I know the NYT game solvers expect a nice light ease into the week …. But I also don’t like making a clear-cut pattern yet; like sometimes I’ll put a beast of a puzzle on a Friday, Saturday will be a breeze, and then Sunday will be somewhere in between. Sometimes I’ll throw you a curveball and there will be four five pangrams on a Monday …[mentions game with HAUNTED] That was a weird one for Monday; I kick myself that I didn’t run it in time for Hallowe’en …
SE: “Part of what makes these games so fun ….it’s so satisfying to reach a certain level in the Bee – also the nice battle of wits with your nemesis editor because you are in fact smarter than him [sic], and you made it to Genius even though that medical term and that bird weren’t allowed, you did it anyway, you rule.”
SE [paraphrased] SB really blew up during the onset of the pandemic … it was so wild to see that part of the reason that the game took off was that it helped people get through, helped them COPE [laughter] – in uncertain times you could have something to do every day that could give you joy … connect with remote family and friends through the game. It’s so much more than just the puzzle experience.
Host: Has SB increased subscriptions?SE: It certainly has. But I just want people to have fun.
Audience Q&A
Q: Any plans for extending the SB archive further back than two weeks? We demand more.SE: To be honest, I have no involvement in that. Audience: Yes we want the entire archive.SE: He’ll pass that on.
Q: Is there any interesting internal jargon for things that come up in the SB backroom?SE: Honestly the majority of the jargon comes from the SB forum (acronyms)
Q: Is there a SB pangram that you’ve wanted to make work but have not succeeded?SE: He found a “banger of a pangram” chose a center letter with the most flexibility, but it yielded only 12 words “that’s not enough of a puzzle” – tried diff center letters, no dice. Might have been GAZPACHO [had used it in the past, wanted to use it again, tried diff enter letter, didn’t work. Really frustrating. “SB solvers might have noticed that I do repeat pangrams very far and few, but if I do so it’s going to be with a diff center letter. … changing that center letter drastically changes the word list.”
Host: I’m going to ask you a question that some people have asked me to ask you …SE: Is it the S?
Host. If a bunch of people put in a word that’s not admissible and everybody fusses and screams and kvetches in the Forum, do you ever change your mind later?SE: Absolutely! There’s a bit of an evolution to that; philosophically, I was so concerned with making sure that the Bee was consistent, and consistent over time, that unless this is the most glaring error in the universe (and I’m not taking about COPE), but clearly this word just got completely missed, and everybody caught it, and call it a correction, and that it will be there for next time. I think I’m a decent cook, but one time DEGLAZED was not in the puzzle, right around Thanksgiving time, too, and everybody was like, “Are you kidding me”? and I had to tweet out about DEGLAZE, that I didn’t know what was going on with that, and that it would be there next time. Lately, more often than not, I’ve just accepted, thrown in the towel, realizing that the English language- and especially an English language word game is going to be arbitrary no matter how you slice and dice it. Everybody’s got their wheelhouse. I did not even touch on the question of what makes for a loan word that is an English word vs a word that is found in cuisine or used predominantly in another language but by many English speakers but is not listed in M-W yet (he pronounces it “Miriam”) – decisions like that, I want things to adjust over time, sort of as the hive mind sees fit, for the most part, so I’m constantly adding little touches, especially depending on what my tester panel says, and I’m like “If this wasn’t allowed four months ago, I’m like, whatever, it’s allowed now, so I don’t really … They’re not going to remember.”
Q: Thank you for the Spelling Bee Buddy. What is the algorithm for the hints? What order they’re in, and is there any criteria that stops me from getting the same hint for the same word for 5 out of 6 hints? SE: I truly cannot answer. The team that created the Wordlebot is the team that created the Spelling Bee Buddy. I’m outside that room.
Q: I’ve noticed that some words have disappeared. I always try ATTAINT, it’s not there any more.SE: Yes, they have.
SE, in remarks on the development of his puzzle pro career: At the NYT, he was told that he would “be helping out on some special projects down the road, and here we are, in the most special project of them all, the Spelling Bee, it’s the highlight of what I do now, nobody even knows that at Crosswords.”
(He lives in Buffalo! Oof, all those claims of Big NYC bias go right out the window.)
Host: “How do you pick your letters [for Spelling Bee] every day?”SE: “Very carefully. … I start with the pangram; that’s the linchpin of the whole puzzle. … Picking the center letter in particular is a matter of [choosing the one that will yield the best word list; E will yield too many, V too few…] Start with the pangram, figure out a good center letter, and … it’s just vibes.”
Q: Do you use AI?SE: “I have a database at my disposal [of merged lexicons to identify possible pangrams] … “There are so many pangrams that I do a lot of dumpster diving. … What I like to do is find a good mix of pangrams or okay pangrams, but there [are] other merits for puzzle. I work in week batches… I look in a given Monday through Sunday time frame [to ask] Is this a good set of seven? So, today’s puzzle was kind of stacked against yesterday’s, and all the way through the remainder of the week I’m always trying to offer a good bit of variety, because I know – and we will certainly get to this – throughout the hive mind you all have so many different things you like (and dislike!) about your Spelling Bee puzzles, so I really and truly-- at the heart of everything I do is to offer something fun and enjoyable for truly everybody out there, whether you are an ardent Queen Bee player on your own or through the Spelling Bee Buddy, whether you are learning the English language by playing this game, whether you are simply striving to beat your previous time taken to get to Amazing in a single day. There are so many different ways to play this game.”
Re: The Spelling Bee Forum
SE: “Hivemind’s got some powerful, um, powerful [unintelligible]Host: “A lot of the people in the Hive… Do any of you [audience] read the comments? [audience signals yes; SE raises hand and grins] [Host to SE:] Can we talk about that, Sam? [It’s the] best part. I do read the comments once in a while and sometimes they’re a little loony. [SE signals “not that bad!”] How do you… oh, severe, severe. They’re a little bit tough.”SE: “Passionate.”Host: “Oh, passionate. Okay.”SE: “Passionate. OK, how do I cope?”Host: “Yeah, cope.”SE: “As clichéd as it sounds, [but] I truly mean this, with great something comes great responsibility. … If I want to remain ironclad in my own philosophies, decisions, or what I like in a word game, then I am doing a disservice to truly everybody out there… So, the good, the bad, and the ugly it really all comes with the territory…”
SE: “Of course I read the comments, I read the tweets, I can’t help myself … I think it makes this game better… I want this game to live and breathe with its audience … that’s part of what makes Spelling Bee and all our games great, is that there’s that humanness to the game, its imperfections and all.”
Re: Perceptions of Common and Uncommon Words
Host: “Everybody wants to know: You say as a disclaimer on the website [?] I think it’s on the hints page that some of the definitions or some of the acceptable words are quirky, I mean that your limitations can be quirky. … We’re not going to talk about individual words that we insist are words…As I was emailing you, grumbling—”SE: “Are you a birdwatcher too?”Host: “No. So how do you decide?”SE: “My guiding philosophy is that One person’s wheelhouse – personal background, really, and if we get on a deeper level like personal identity -- could be perceived as another person’s esoterica or just flat-out unfamiliarity... So my goal is asking myself, what feels fair for this wide-ranging audience? [and] that question is inherently flawed because I have my own biases and perceptions too…”
Re: relative commonness of Bee words: “I don’t think [that] I or any one person can prescribe [sic] commonness, so I always – I don’t chortle, I’m not menacing – but when somebody says in the comments that “This is not a common word” or “Here’s a much more common word,” I think to myself [that] there are some cases that are more arguable than others, but I say to myself, well, that’s one take, and there might be a gazillion other people who make that take, too, and maybe I have the wrong take today. I’m happy to have the wrong take… I’m tiptoeing around all this because everybody has what they do and don’t know, even if that’s one word versus that’s two words, or something like that.”
“My more methodical process is that I have multiple dictionaries; I mostly favor M-W online and the Apple on the Mac and that pulls from New Oxford American; [those are] my two major ones. I’d say the Apple one in particular helps me [decide] the more arbitrary cases about [whether to] allow an “unword” or not.
He uses Google news tab a lot to look at contemporaneous use of words in question: Was a word used in an article that is not a specialist publication? He may select “vocabulary words” that may not be in common parlance but might be good synonyms for more common words.
Host re: words as personal identify -- challah, yenta [which spelling of yente, he says?] Host: Tell us about an embarrassing moment re: hive.SE: [Story about having left COPE out of a pandemic-era puzzle (Oct 2020?) – “I didn’t know what to do with myself”] [also told about when CLICKBAIT was omitted – see NYT story on that[
Does the Bee get harder as the week goes by?
Host: Does SB get harder as we progress through the week?SE: I don’t know any more. Originally set out to have it random, so solvers will come back every day. Some like longer puzzles, some like shorter. [He might] put the longer puzzles or those with tougher pangram (“something a little on the technical side”) toward the weekend – “I might put that on a Friday or Saturday more than on a Monday when I know the NYT game solvers expect a nice light ease into the week …. But I also don’t like making a clear-cut pattern yet; like sometimes I’ll put a beast of a puzzle on a Friday, Saturday will be a breeze, and then Sunday will be somewhere in between. Sometimes I’ll throw you a curveball and there will be four five pangrams on a Monday …[mentions game with HAUNTED] That was a weird one for Monday; I kick myself that I didn’t run it in time for Hallowe’en …
SE: “Part of what makes these games so fun ….it’s so satisfying to reach a certain level in the Bee – also the nice battle of wits with your nemesis editor because you are in fact smarter than him [sic], and you made it to Genius even though that medical term and that bird weren’t allowed, you did it anyway, you rule.”
SE [paraphrased] SB really blew up during the onset of the pandemic … it was so wild to see that part of the reason that the game took off was that it helped people get through, helped them COPE [laughter] – in uncertain times you could have something to do every day that could give you joy … connect with remote family and friends through the game. It’s so much more than just the puzzle experience.
Host: Has SB increased subscriptions?SE: It certainly has. But I just want people to have fun.
Audience Q&A
Q: Any plans for extending the SB archive further back than two weeks? We demand more.SE: To be honest, I have no involvement in that. Audience: Yes we want the entire archive.SE: He’ll pass that on.
Q: Is there any interesting internal jargon for things that come up in the SB backroom?SE: Honestly the majority of the jargon comes from the SB forum (acronyms)
Q: Is there a SB pangram that you’ve wanted to make work but have not succeeded?SE: He found a “banger of a pangram” chose a center letter with the most flexibility, but it yielded only 12 words “that’s not enough of a puzzle” – tried diff center letters, no dice. Might have been GAZPACHO [had used it in the past, wanted to use it again, tried diff enter letter, didn’t work. Really frustrating. “SB solvers might have noticed that I do repeat pangrams very far and few, but if I do so it’s going to be with a diff center letter. … changing that center letter drastically changes the word list.”
Host: I’m going to ask you a question that some people have asked me to ask you …SE: Is it the S?
Host. If a bunch of people put in a word that’s not admissible and everybody fusses and screams and kvetches in the Forum, do you ever change your mind later?SE: Absolutely! There’s a bit of an evolution to that; philosophically, I was so concerned with making sure that the Bee was consistent, and consistent over time, that unless this is the most glaring error in the universe (and I’m not taking about COPE), but clearly this word just got completely missed, and everybody caught it, and call it a correction, and that it will be there for next time. I think I’m a decent cook, but one time DEGLAZED was not in the puzzle, right around Thanksgiving time, too, and everybody was like, “Are you kidding me”? and I had to tweet out about DEGLAZE, that I didn’t know what was going on with that, and that it would be there next time. Lately, more often than not, I’ve just accepted, thrown in the towel, realizing that the English language- and especially an English language word game is going to be arbitrary no matter how you slice and dice it. Everybody’s got their wheelhouse. I did not even touch on the question of what makes for a loan word that is an English word vs a word that is found in cuisine or used predominantly in another language but by many English speakers but is not listed in M-W yet (he pronounces it “Miriam”) – decisions like that, I want things to adjust over time, sort of as the hive mind sees fit, for the most part, so I’m constantly adding little touches, especially depending on what my tester panel says, and I’m like “If this wasn’t allowed four months ago, I’m like, whatever, it’s allowed now, so I don’t really … They’re not going to remember.”
Q: Thank you for the Spelling Bee Buddy. What is the algorithm for the hints? What order they’re in, and is there any criteria that stops me from getting the same hint for the same word for 5 out of 6 hints? SE: I truly cannot answer. The team that created the Wordlebot is the team that created the Spelling Bee Buddy. I’m outside that room.
Q: I’ve noticed that some words have disappeared. I always try ATTAINT, it’s not there any more.SE: Yes, they have.
SE, in remarks on the development of his puzzle pro career: At the NYT, he was told that he would “be helping out on some special projects down the road, and here we are, in the most special project of them all, the Spelling Bee, it’s the highlight of what I do now, nobody even knows that at Crosswords.”
(He lives in Buffalo! Oof, all those claims of Big NYC bias go right out the window.)