Resources: Selected Audio and Video Transcripts
LexiConnexxions provides transcripts of selected audio and video programs about the Spelling Bee, in particular, interviews with the Spelling Bee editor Sam Ezersky.
For the fullest experience, LexiConnexxions recommends listening or watching the source productions. Sam E is loads of fun.
LexiConnexxions claims no copyright on these transcriptions.
If you cite information from any LexiConnexxions report, please give credit and a link to the relevant page. These reports and analyses are compiled and prepared by a person, not a machine. Thank you.
CAVEAT LECTOR: All the resources in this guide have been reviewed for reasonable quality. Some of the citations in this listing include content notes and/or gentle caveats from LexiConnexxions, usually in [square brackets]. Content at external links may change or disappear, or the links themselves may die or disappear. The existence, content, safety, and security of third-party sites is beyond our control.
Hello Puzzlers Podcast: Special Guest Sam EzerskyApr 12 2026https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMrHaTEppvg
The "Hello Puzzlers" podcast recorded an episode at the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament in May. Among the guests was Spelling Bee editor Sam Ezersky (who was a crossword constructor long before he became Bee editor). The segment with Sam E, in which he discusses the Spelling Bee (especially word selection), begins at 18:00. The machine-generated transcript at the link is so laden with errors that LexiConnexxions has transcribed the interview.
LEXICONNEXXIONS TRANSCRIPT
INTERVIEWER: No one in the puzzle world gets more passionate feedback than Sam Ezersky … Everyone loves the Spelling Bee and everyone has a strong opinion about what words should and should not be in the Spelling Bee.
SAM EZERSKY: I can't believe I signed up for this .. OMG, what are you going to put me through
HOST: Just one example: The Raffia Incident... 2019?
SE: 2019, yeah
HOST: Would you remind folks about that?
SE: I learned my first real Spelling Bee word list lesson when I made the grave mistake of omitting RAFFIA from a word list. There was the normal cacophony of feedback, but much to my surprise [when] I showed up to Will [Shortz]'s house in Pleasantville, Will I don't even know if you remember this, and you had received a package that was forwarded to you from The Times, and it contained -- and it contained -- I still have the receipt right here in my favorites -- it was a package from Amazon that contained 218 yards of raffia paper kraft ribbon packing paper twine1/4 inch x 218 yards. [laughter] The note reads -- and I think this was my favorite part, [because] it wasn't even addressed to me, it was yelling at you, Will: It said, 'Dear Mr Shortz, This is raffia. Spelling Bee on the New York Times puzzle page says it does not believe that raffia is a word. Amazon doesn't sell ortolans or caracals, or I might have sent one of those, too. Please improve Spelling Bee's word list.' I will also add really briefly, too, that I just last year received a note that somebody has donated to the World Wildlife Foundation in my name to protect a caracal. So I have a caracal that has been adopted in my name. This is why I say 'impassioned fans' and it makes the game better, it makes the world better, apparently. And you [indicating member of the audience?] have a bunch of raffia."
Other Host: Can I just suggest that next time you don't allow CHOCOLATE? We would be very happy to receive 200 lb of chocolate any time
SE: The problem was that I did allow CHOCOLATE that was a pangram but in that same puzzle I did not allow ECHOLOCATE because that verb was not showing up in every dictionary as opposed to ECHOLOCATION. So I messed that one up, too.
Other Host: Sorry to bring that up. I didn't mean to go there!
21:32 SE: Yes, please, I'm going to start omitting all my favorite things. You can just send them to me rather than Will.
Other Host: Boom! Off the list! straight to your front door.
HOST: So yes, the RAFFIA incident is what inspired this puzzle, because I felt that sending that [raffia] to Will's house was a very "godfather" move it was [something] vaguely threatening
Other Host: We know where you live, and here's the RAFFIA.
HOST: So we think that maybe there is a RAFFIA MAFIA. [discussion of pronunciation of RAFFIA vs MAFIA].22:12 So in this puzzle, I'm going to give just a handful of words; it’s going to be two words that rhyme; one of them will be a word that was controversially omitted at one time from the Spelling Bee. Now, some of them have made their way back in, because Sam is flexible. He makes judgement calls.
[discussion of whether audience can assist]
SE: If you picked truly the most controversial ones, I will know them all.
HOST: I'm going to stress -- for instance, if the word were RAFFIA MAFIA, the clue would have been a criminal organization that sells grass for Easter Egg baskets, so I'm going to stress that controversial word definitions. All right, we're going to start with "a terrified Scottish land owner."
SE: Okay, ... terrified-- a scared LAIRD. Not in word list.
HOST: A scared LAIRD, exactly. Oaky, how about a hilarious fabric used in making sacks?
23:47 SE That is a funny GUNNY, not currently [in word list.]
HOST: Certainly not.
SE: laughs This is great
HOST: Now this one I think it made it back in, so it's very exciting, and I was very excited to see it, it’s one of my favorite words. Someone who is experiencing a sandstorm for the very first time.
SE: Oh wow, that's a good one. This one I added back in the word list and people were like, what the heck is that. That 'Dear Mr Shortz, This is raffia. Spelling Bee on the New York Times puzzle page says it does not believe that raffia is a word. Amazon doesn't sell ortolans or caracals, or I might have sent one of those, too. Please improve Spelling Bee's word list.' would be a HABOOB NOOB. In the word list.. yah cool.
HOST: Only three more, you're almost done!
SE: This seat is so hot.
HOST: A nonmonogamous Scottish herding dog.
SE: That would be a POLY COLLIE.
[chit chat]
HOST: Something that is very very exemplary of pizza cheese.
[laughter]
SE: So yeah, this one is like -- sorry to my West Coasters -- it's HELLA MOZZARELLA -- right on the border there.
HOST: OK, we're going to end on a high note, we always like to go highbrow.
SE: Oh boy, I feel like I already know what this one is. [laughter]
HOST: Someone who hangs around rock and roll bands who is covered in excrement.
SE: Oh, I actually thought we were going to go highbrow here. Yeah, so that is POOPY GROUPIE. Not currently in word list. I know, I know, I know. I love the outrage.
26:30
Questions and answers
HOST: First of all, it does beg the question that you’ve been asked a million times: What is the process for choosing words for Spelling Bee?
SE: Oh gosh, we have an hour, right?
HOST: And only use words that are allowed in the [Bee].
SE: Poopy. [laughter] So I guess I'll just backtrack and say when I choose any puzzle for Spelling Bee, I always start with the pangram or set of pangrams, that's the linchpin of the puzzle that is the whole ... you're solving for many reasons, but if you're not even familiar with the pangram or one of the set of pangrams, that what's even the point? I want this to be a puzzle that is truly, as hackneyed as it sounds, for everybody. So then I have, you know, at my technological disposal, I have every word that could possibly be made up [from] this set of seven letters. After sort of figuring out what's a good letter for the center-- if I want it to be a really long puzzle, I'll put an E in the center. If I want you all to shake your fists at me, I'll put a Y in the center, right? Sorry! But then you go through and for all the discussion about the word list, I do think that if any of you were in my -- If I were to show the exact process, a lot of the calls would be really easy. You see BALL, you're like, yeah, no problem. You see a word that is showing up in the very expansive Scrabble player's lexicon, but it is not in M-W or NOAD it is red underlined when you try to text it, that's going to be a NO for me, dog.
HOST: Does dawg appear on the list? D-A-W-G?
SE: Great question! I don't-- Somebody will know. Probably not.
[unintelligible]
SE: Let's focus on slang. What happens when you have a word like HELLA? I have received comments from some of my testers that DUNNO is very surprising to see that in Spelling Bee. it is so informal. However, that is a word that I'd say at this point off the top of my head I'm not sure it might be tagged as informal in dictionaries, but you see it-- it is pretty standard to write out "I dunno" as opposed to it just being sort of dialectic [sic] slang. So I find-- that is just one consideration I find fascinating-- where do you draw the line on something like slang? Right now I don't allow YEET-- But another thing we talk about with the crossword especially, we talk about staying power. Is this just something that the kids are using right now and people are going to go "what happened to my beautiful crossword? It just has all this crazy generational slang?" I believe I just added CONVO to the [Bee] list. [Ed.: Yes, it was added Fb 18 2026]. And I think that is-- that's tricky. I would understand if you were like "Honestly?" [To audience:] Thumbs up, thumbs down on CONVO? [most thumbs up, some thumbs down] I'm glad that I seemed to have reached the consensus, great, but it's really not open and shut.
[unrelated chat]
SE: You can have it be data driven to an extent -- I know people talk about "Why don't you use google Ngram or something like that?" and google Ngram does tend to skew very academic scientific journal-y, for all the people that give me the scientific adjectives, they're like "This shows up 300 quintillion times on google" I'm like "Because it's like the heavy-hitting Wikipedia articles and whatnot, right?" But one thing I use I'd say--- I like using the News tab of Google a lot, because I like seeing "Is this word something that gets used in scholarly articles, but for this educated wide-ranging audience, is it defined? is it good like "mileage may vary," something like HABOOB? Is it a word that is broad enough to-- maybe a particular group feels like something that is enriching in a sense that somebody might not go "Well, that's crazily esoteric." I don't know! Maybe a lot of you will be thumbs down on HABOOB: "What the heck is that? Get that out of my word list." But one thing I think is really interesting is that every solver out there both anecdotally and in our data and in our feedback, has their own personalized wheelhouse. I definitely do not get every call right or anywhere close to it! For those of you who approached me this weekend, I just gotta smile laugh and say "I understand!" I sympathize with frustration; I'd be shaking my fist, too. I am impassioned about puzzles, but for every solver out there who comes up to me and says "You're missing so many science words, you were asleep in ninth grade biology, its really clear, but what the heck is ANNATTO and what are all these cooking terms? Why are they in my word list? You need to balance it out more." There is another solver that comes up to me and says "You finally ANNATTO! Here's ten more cooking terms, but you need to relax on all these science-y terms, not everyone is a big STEM person."
HOST: Well, whatever you do, it works; it's so fun and so addictive.
SE: And it's a work in progress. I just want to say that's what's so exciting; you say Spelling Bee is this arbitrary game and the word list is so arbitrary and I'm like "Yes! Language is arbitrary." Everything we know is just kind of arbitrary around what we speak. I want this game to live and breathe with its audience.
HOST: One thing I love about the Spelling Bee is that it makes it so clear about how insane the English language is. We talked about this -- sometimes you have an -OR and sometimes you have -ER and sometimes you have [...] It's a nutty language.
SE: Big agree. I wish I had an example in my back pocket ... You have this word, then you have an adjective form by adding -ANT -- like IRRITANT. [but other adjectives don't follow the same pattern.] Words are weird: that's my TL;DR. Language is weird.
[chatter about other words, not related to Spelling Bee]
HOST: Why 3AM?
SE: Oh gosh. It's still 3AM Eastern Time. [anecdotal chat] Honestly, I wish I had a better answer. Honestly, it's above my paygrade. I know the discussion was around --- and this has become controversial now that we have Wordle and Connections at your local time -- but we talked about having something a little different than the crossword; we didn't want all the games to release [at the same time] .. of course, then you're getting no sleep. I don’t know how the middle of the night was decided on, but maybe unlike the crossword, you can wake up in the morning to solve it. Stagger the puzzles, not all at once. I know it's confusing. I sympathize.
[end of interview] LexiConnexxions claims no copyright on this content.
SAM EZERSKY: I can't believe I signed up for this .. OMG, what are you going to put me through
HOST: Just one example: The Raffia Incident... 2019?
SE: 2019, yeah
HOST: Would you remind folks about that?
SE: I learned my first real Spelling Bee word list lesson when I made the grave mistake of omitting RAFFIA from a word list. There was the normal cacophony of feedback, but much to my surprise [when] I showed up to Will [Shortz]'s house in Pleasantville, Will I don't even know if you remember this, and you had received a package that was forwarded to you from The Times, and it contained -- and it contained -- I still have the receipt right here in my favorites -- it was a package from Amazon that contained 218 yards of raffia paper kraft ribbon packing paper twine1/4 inch x 218 yards. [laughter] The note reads -- and I think this was my favorite part, [because] it wasn't even addressed to me, it was yelling at you, Will: It said, 'Dear Mr Shortz, This is raffia. Spelling Bee on the New York Times puzzle page says it does not believe that raffia is a word. Amazon doesn't sell ortolans or caracals, or I might have sent one of those, too. Please improve Spelling Bee's word list.' I will also add really briefly, too, that I just last year received a note that somebody has donated to the World Wildlife Foundation in my name to protect a caracal. So I have a caracal that has been adopted in my name. This is why I say 'impassioned fans' and it makes the game better, it makes the world better, apparently. And you [indicating member of the audience?] have a bunch of raffia."
Other Host: Can I just suggest that next time you don't allow CHOCOLATE? We would be very happy to receive 200 lb of chocolate any time
SE: The problem was that I did allow CHOCOLATE that was a pangram but in that same puzzle I did not allow ECHOLOCATE because that verb was not showing up in every dictionary as opposed to ECHOLOCATION. So I messed that one up, too.
Other Host: Sorry to bring that up. I didn't mean to go there!
21:32 SE: Yes, please, I'm going to start omitting all my favorite things. You can just send them to me rather than Will.
Other Host: Boom! Off the list! straight to your front door.
HOST: So yes, the RAFFIA incident is what inspired this puzzle, because I felt that sending that [raffia] to Will's house was a very "godfather" move it was [something] vaguely threatening
Other Host: We know where you live, and here's the RAFFIA.
HOST: So we think that maybe there is a RAFFIA MAFIA. [discussion of pronunciation of RAFFIA vs MAFIA].22:12 So in this puzzle, I'm going to give just a handful of words; it’s going to be two words that rhyme; one of them will be a word that was controversially omitted at one time from the Spelling Bee. Now, some of them have made their way back in, because Sam is flexible. He makes judgement calls.
[discussion of whether audience can assist]
SE: If you picked truly the most controversial ones, I will know them all.
HOST: I'm going to stress -- for instance, if the word were RAFFIA MAFIA, the clue would have been a criminal organization that sells grass for Easter Egg baskets, so I'm going to stress that controversial word definitions. All right, we're going to start with "a terrified Scottish land owner."
SE: Okay, ... terrified-- a scared LAIRD. Not in word list.
HOST: A scared LAIRD, exactly. Oaky, how about a hilarious fabric used in making sacks?
23:47 SE That is a funny GUNNY, not currently [in word list.]
HOST: Certainly not.
SE: laughs This is great
HOST: Now this one I think it made it back in, so it's very exciting, and I was very excited to see it, it’s one of my favorite words. Someone who is experiencing a sandstorm for the very first time.
SE: Oh wow, that's a good one. This one I added back in the word list and people were like, what the heck is that. That 'Dear Mr Shortz, This is raffia. Spelling Bee on the New York Times puzzle page says it does not believe that raffia is a word. Amazon doesn't sell ortolans or caracals, or I might have sent one of those, too. Please improve Spelling Bee's word list.' would be a HABOOB NOOB. In the word list.. yah cool.
HOST: Only three more, you're almost done!
SE: This seat is so hot.
HOST: A nonmonogamous Scottish herding dog.
SE: That would be a POLY COLLIE.
[chit chat]
HOST: Something that is very very exemplary of pizza cheese.
[laughter]
SE: So yeah, this one is like -- sorry to my West Coasters -- it's HELLA MOZZARELLA -- right on the border there.
HOST: OK, we're going to end on a high note, we always like to go highbrow.
SE: Oh boy, I feel like I already know what this one is. [laughter]
HOST: Someone who hangs around rock and roll bands who is covered in excrement.
SE: Oh, I actually thought we were going to go highbrow here. Yeah, so that is POOPY GROUPIE. Not currently in word list. I know, I know, I know. I love the outrage.
26:30
Questions and answers
HOST: First of all, it does beg the question that you’ve been asked a million times: What is the process for choosing words for Spelling Bee?
SE: Oh gosh, we have an hour, right?
HOST: And only use words that are allowed in the [Bee].
SE: Poopy. [laughter] So I guess I'll just backtrack and say when I choose any puzzle for Spelling Bee, I always start with the pangram or set of pangrams, that's the linchpin of the puzzle that is the whole ... you're solving for many reasons, but if you're not even familiar with the pangram or one of the set of pangrams, that what's even the point? I want this to be a puzzle that is truly, as hackneyed as it sounds, for everybody. So then I have, you know, at my technological disposal, I have every word that could possibly be made up [from] this set of seven letters. After sort of figuring out what's a good letter for the center-- if I want it to be a really long puzzle, I'll put an E in the center. If I want you all to shake your fists at me, I'll put a Y in the center, right? Sorry! But then you go through and for all the discussion about the word list, I do think that if any of you were in my -- If I were to show the exact process, a lot of the calls would be really easy. You see BALL, you're like, yeah, no problem. You see a word that is showing up in the very expansive Scrabble player's lexicon, but it is not in M-W or NOAD it is red underlined when you try to text it, that's going to be a NO for me, dog.
HOST: Does dawg appear on the list? D-A-W-G?
SE: Great question! I don't-- Somebody will know. Probably not.
[unintelligible]
SE: Let's focus on slang. What happens when you have a word like HELLA? I have received comments from some of my testers that DUNNO is very surprising to see that in Spelling Bee. it is so informal. However, that is a word that I'd say at this point off the top of my head I'm not sure it might be tagged as informal in dictionaries, but you see it-- it is pretty standard to write out "I dunno" as opposed to it just being sort of dialectic [sic] slang. So I find-- that is just one consideration I find fascinating-- where do you draw the line on something like slang? Right now I don't allow YEET-- But another thing we talk about with the crossword especially, we talk about staying power. Is this just something that the kids are using right now and people are going to go "what happened to my beautiful crossword? It just has all this crazy generational slang?" I believe I just added CONVO to the [Bee] list. [Ed.: Yes, it was added Fb 18 2026]. And I think that is-- that's tricky. I would understand if you were like "Honestly?" [To audience:] Thumbs up, thumbs down on CONVO? [most thumbs up, some thumbs down] I'm glad that I seemed to have reached the consensus, great, but it's really not open and shut.
[unrelated chat]
SE: You can have it be data driven to an extent -- I know people talk about "Why don't you use google Ngram or something like that?" and google Ngram does tend to skew very academic scientific journal-y, for all the people that give me the scientific adjectives, they're like "This shows up 300 quintillion times on google" I'm like "Because it's like the heavy-hitting Wikipedia articles and whatnot, right?" But one thing I use I'd say--- I like using the News tab of Google a lot, because I like seeing "Is this word something that gets used in scholarly articles, but for this educated wide-ranging audience, is it defined? is it good like "mileage may vary," something like HABOOB? Is it a word that is broad enough to-- maybe a particular group feels like something that is enriching in a sense that somebody might not go "Well, that's crazily esoteric." I don't know! Maybe a lot of you will be thumbs down on HABOOB: "What the heck is that? Get that out of my word list." But one thing I think is really interesting is that every solver out there both anecdotally and in our data and in our feedback, has their own personalized wheelhouse. I definitely do not get every call right or anywhere close to it! For those of you who approached me this weekend, I just gotta smile laugh and say "I understand!" I sympathize with frustration; I'd be shaking my fist, too. I am impassioned about puzzles, but for every solver out there who comes up to me and says "You're missing so many science words, you were asleep in ninth grade biology, its really clear, but what the heck is ANNATTO and what are all these cooking terms? Why are they in my word list? You need to balance it out more." There is another solver that comes up to me and says "You finally ANNATTO! Here's ten more cooking terms, but you need to relax on all these science-y terms, not everyone is a big STEM person."
HOST: Well, whatever you do, it works; it's so fun and so addictive.
SE: And it's a work in progress. I just want to say that's what's so exciting; you say Spelling Bee is this arbitrary game and the word list is so arbitrary and I'm like "Yes! Language is arbitrary." Everything we know is just kind of arbitrary around what we speak. I want this game to live and breathe with its audience.
HOST: One thing I love about the Spelling Bee is that it makes it so clear about how insane the English language is. We talked about this -- sometimes you have an -OR and sometimes you have -ER and sometimes you have [...] It's a nutty language.
SE: Big agree. I wish I had an example in my back pocket ... You have this word, then you have an adjective form by adding -ANT -- like IRRITANT. [but other adjectives don't follow the same pattern.] Words are weird: that's my TL;DR. Language is weird.
[chatter about other words, not related to Spelling Bee]
HOST: Why 3AM?
SE: Oh gosh. It's still 3AM Eastern Time. [anecdotal chat] Honestly, I wish I had a better answer. Honestly, it's above my paygrade. I know the discussion was around --- and this has become controversial now that we have Wordle and Connections at your local time -- but we talked about having something a little different than the crossword; we didn't want all the games to release [at the same time] .. of course, then you're getting no sleep. I don’t know how the middle of the night was decided on, but maybe unlike the crossword, you can wake up in the morning to solve it. Stagger the puzzles, not all at once. I know it's confusing. I sympathize.
[end of interview] LexiConnexxions claims no copyright on this content.
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. Description of the event here: https://writersblocpresents.com/main/sam-ezersky/
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.
NOTE: The 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.”) LEXICONNEXXIONS TRANSCRIPT
Re: Creating each 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 his 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 I 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.
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.) LexiConnexxions claims no copyright on this content.
NOTE: The 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.”) LEXICONNEXXIONS TRANSCRIPT
Re: Creating each 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 his 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 I 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.
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.) LexiConnexxions claims no copyright on this content.