Resources: Selected Audio and Video Transcripts
LexiConnexxions provides these transcripts of selected audio and video programs about the Spelling Bee, in particular, interviews with the Spelling Bee editor Sam Ezersky.
Only portions of these programs relevant to the Spelling Bee have been transcribed. For the fullest experience, LexiConnexxions recommends listening or watching the source productions. Sam E is loads of fun.
Transcriptions of brief Instagram reels are provided with their citations in the main listings. Some of this material has edited lightly for clarity, or to remove speech artifacts (um, like, you know) from verbatim transcripts of live interviews. LexiConnexxions has added clarifying information in [square brackets] as needed.
LexiConnexxions claims no copyright on these transcriptions.
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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 Only portions relevant to Sam's editing of the Spelling Bee puzzle are included here.
TRANSCRIPT BY LEXICONNEXXIONS
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.
Questions and answers
HOST: 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.
Questions and answers
HOST: 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.
The New York Times Spelling BeeAll of It with Alison Stewart, WNYC, January 13, 2022 (13 minutes)https://www.wnyc.org/story/new-york-times-spelling-bee/
New York Times digital puzzles editor Sam Ezersky joins “All of It with Alison Stewart” to talk about the “Spelling Bee.” We also ask callers about their feelings about the bee.
TRANSCRIPT BY LEXICONNEXXIONS
Q: What was Spelling Bee intended to add to the NYT suite of games?SE: Crossword is intellectual, trivia, wordplay, punny clues… Spelling Bee really can cast a wider net, because it’s all about your own lexicon: how many words do you know? It is encouraging. There are very many thresholds [SB scoring ranks] It’s really your own adventure, and I think that’s what I think it [brings] to the [NYT Games].
Q: The Bee is like the “People’s Puzzle.” You eschew Scrabble words. Would you share an example of a Scrabble word and why you choose not to include those kinds of words?SE: Part of the philosophy of catering to such a wide-spread audience is that you can’t just use a single dictionary untouched, because nobody’s ever going to find every last word in there, right? I was just editing a puzzle the other day, and it had NANE, some Scrabble-y word. I could not tell you what this word means. I do a lot of research on what words make the cut – a lot of them are straightforward, some are more line-judge calls, everybody has their own personal wheelhouse, of course, but there are some more obvious calls, like that one – this is a word in the expansive Scrabble lexicon, it’s probably not the best fit for the New York Times Spelling Bee, where I want solvers, overarchingly, regardless of who you are, to be vastly familiar with every last thing in the word list.
Q: In general, what kinds of words do appear in the Bee? Just generally speaking?SE: It’s interesting. My metric used to be, when I started (and it’s actually still the label for the print Spelling Bee that appears in the Magazine), was all about commonness: What are some common words? But hearing from a plethora of different solvers from all sorts of backgrounds, commonness is – I can’t define commonness myself, right? I just have one background of my own. My guiding question is what feels fair? Recognizing such a wide-spread audience one person’s arcana might be part of another person’s background, it hits them, it’s a word they use every day, if you’re scientific, if you’re literary, if you are of a certain culture. So it’s really just about balancing that with a lot of research to make the best list possible for any solver out there.
Q: What kind of words don’t count?SE: I’ll do some digging … I have several lexicons at my disposal. My preferred ones are my Mac dictionary, Merriam-Webster, as well as Collins Scrabble words, I also like using--
Q: [curses and swear words?]SE: I won’t allow anything vulgar. I also choose not to allow anything that someone could see as a slur. None of that. Also, another basic rule about the Bee: No capitalized proper names, nouns, adjectives, everything must be a lower-case English word, or common enough to render as a lower-case English word. What I mean by that caveat, is believe it or not, the drink, a manhattan, counts in Spelling Bee because it is lower-case when you spell it that way, referring to the drink, so that counts. But something like… I see solvers asking about something Cyrillic; that won’t count, because that is a capitalized adjective for a language. Rules like that are the hard and fast rules. One thing that is fascinating to me is that words that are just missing from certain lexicons that I never would have guessed myself. I’m a puzzle editor, I’m not a lexicographer, but I find it fascinating – I distinctly remember a couple of years ago, I actually went in and added the word “laggy” you know, referring to slow internet, which wasn’t in my base list, and I’m guessing that this was maybe more modern-ish slang that is now widely accepted, but it was not in my list, and don’t quote me on this, but I believe it was missing from Merriam-Webster as well, as well as Scrabble. But it’s laggy! Solvers are going to find laggy. I’m not a dictionary myself. I’m attempting to edit a wide-spread lexicon for the people, if you will. So you all are finding laggy? Makes sense to me, I’ll throw laggy in next time. I do add words to the list, I’ll have you know.
Q: Bee took on another life during the pandemic. When did you realize that the Be had sort of exploded?SE: When my mentions were being flooded with words and word list suggestions, more than ever. During the pandemic, people were looking for diversions… and ways to connect… My family, too; my dad still spams me with word lists requests, too. It was midway through 2020, I’d already known that Spelling Bee was starting to develop a subculture, but this was where it truly felt like it took off and transcended a little word game that people could use to sharpen their brains rather than a regular source of fun, delight, and diversion and hopefully only mild annoyance in your daily routine.
LexiConnexxions claims no copyright on this content.
TRANSCRIPT BY LEXICONNEXXIONS
Q: What was Spelling Bee intended to add to the NYT suite of games?SE: Crossword is intellectual, trivia, wordplay, punny clues… Spelling Bee really can cast a wider net, because it’s all about your own lexicon: how many words do you know? It is encouraging. There are very many thresholds [SB scoring ranks] It’s really your own adventure, and I think that’s what I think it [brings] to the [NYT Games].
Q: The Bee is like the “People’s Puzzle.” You eschew Scrabble words. Would you share an example of a Scrabble word and why you choose not to include those kinds of words?SE: Part of the philosophy of catering to such a wide-spread audience is that you can’t just use a single dictionary untouched, because nobody’s ever going to find every last word in there, right? I was just editing a puzzle the other day, and it had NANE, some Scrabble-y word. I could not tell you what this word means. I do a lot of research on what words make the cut – a lot of them are straightforward, some are more line-judge calls, everybody has their own personal wheelhouse, of course, but there are some more obvious calls, like that one – this is a word in the expansive Scrabble lexicon, it’s probably not the best fit for the New York Times Spelling Bee, where I want solvers, overarchingly, regardless of who you are, to be vastly familiar with every last thing in the word list.
Q: In general, what kinds of words do appear in the Bee? Just generally speaking?SE: It’s interesting. My metric used to be, when I started (and it’s actually still the label for the print Spelling Bee that appears in the Magazine), was all about commonness: What are some common words? But hearing from a plethora of different solvers from all sorts of backgrounds, commonness is – I can’t define commonness myself, right? I just have one background of my own. My guiding question is what feels fair? Recognizing such a wide-spread audience one person’s arcana might be part of another person’s background, it hits them, it’s a word they use every day, if you’re scientific, if you’re literary, if you are of a certain culture. So it’s really just about balancing that with a lot of research to make the best list possible for any solver out there.
Q: What kind of words don’t count?SE: I’ll do some digging … I have several lexicons at my disposal. My preferred ones are my Mac dictionary, Merriam-Webster, as well as Collins Scrabble words, I also like using--
Q: [curses and swear words?]SE: I won’t allow anything vulgar. I also choose not to allow anything that someone could see as a slur. None of that. Also, another basic rule about the Bee: No capitalized proper names, nouns, adjectives, everything must be a lower-case English word, or common enough to render as a lower-case English word. What I mean by that caveat, is believe it or not, the drink, a manhattan, counts in Spelling Bee because it is lower-case when you spell it that way, referring to the drink, so that counts. But something like… I see solvers asking about something Cyrillic; that won’t count, because that is a capitalized adjective for a language. Rules like that are the hard and fast rules. One thing that is fascinating to me is that words that are just missing from certain lexicons that I never would have guessed myself. I’m a puzzle editor, I’m not a lexicographer, but I find it fascinating – I distinctly remember a couple of years ago, I actually went in and added the word “laggy” you know, referring to slow internet, which wasn’t in my base list, and I’m guessing that this was maybe more modern-ish slang that is now widely accepted, but it was not in my list, and don’t quote me on this, but I believe it was missing from Merriam-Webster as well, as well as Scrabble. But it’s laggy! Solvers are going to find laggy. I’m not a dictionary myself. I’m attempting to edit a wide-spread lexicon for the people, if you will. So you all are finding laggy? Makes sense to me, I’ll throw laggy in next time. I do add words to the list, I’ll have you know.
Q: Bee took on another life during the pandemic. When did you realize that the Be had sort of exploded?SE: When my mentions were being flooded with words and word list suggestions, more than ever. During the pandemic, people were looking for diversions… and ways to connect… My family, too; my dad still spams me with word lists requests, too. It was midway through 2020, I’d already known that Spelling Bee was starting to develop a subculture, but this was where it truly felt like it took off and transcended a little word game that people could use to sharpen their brains rather than a regular source of fun, delight, and diversion and hopefully only mild annoyance in your daily routine.
LexiConnexxions claims no copyright on this content.
A note from Sam Ezersky to a Bee solver about curating the daily Spelling Bee word listJuly 16, 2019https://x.com/thegridkid/status/1151188527423643649Reported in the Spelling Bee forum July 18, 2019https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/17/crosswords/daily-puzzle-2019-07-18.html#permid=101539351
[right-click the image and select "Open image in new tab" to see a larger display]
ATTN #HiveMind: Just finished off a response to a solver about my thoughts on curating the #SpellingBee word list, and figured this would be helpful for those in the Twitterverse to see it too! Cheers🐝🐝🐝 @NYTimesWordplay @NYT_Crossword1:55PM Jul 16, 2019
TRANSCRIPT BY LEXICONNEXXIONS
Thanks so much for your well-reasoned feedback; it’s definitely something I’ll continue to think about as I curate the daily Bee. I’d be lying if I said [that] you were the first (or even the second, third, or tenth to voice this complaint!
When I edit the word list for a given puzzle, my goal is to keep solvers from all walks of life in mind. Having something that is overly technical or niche us just going to mystify the many in the room [who] aren’t familiar with it, which was my logic behind recently omitting an answer like TROCAR or CHIRAL. Then again, there’s something to be said for the frustration that any solver might have upon discovering a word that isn’t accepted; you know the word, you found it, and your not … receiving any points for it?!
This is all to say: Spelling Bee is one giant balancing act so that I can make the game fun for any solver out there, regardless of background, expansive vocabulary, etc. I spend ample time vetting dictionaries of various breadths, news articles, Google NGram, you name it, to explore the commonness of all those line judge calls, some of which barely get by and others of which just miss the cut.
Also, as much as I try to avoid it, there will always be subjective bias in editing. Everyone has their different knowledge banks, and I just happen to be the one injecting mine into the word list while still always looking to make sure I keep an open mind. There are numerous times that something only barely familiar to me has been included, as my research has proven [that] the word is fair game, given my approach. The fun fact about my omission of several “science-y” terms: I actually have academic backgrounds in mechanical engineering and economics, and happen to be pretty math-y/science-y myself. You’d never know that, though, because I want to make sure [that] this game isn’t just tailored toward someone like me 😊
In any case, I’ll continue to be receptive to any sort of critique [that] solvers have about particular words, gameplay, whatever. I really do appreciate you[r] writing; if you ever have more specific suggestions to fire off, feel free to reach out to NYTCrossword@nytimes.com with your feedback!All best,Sam
LexiConnexxions claims no copyright on this content.
Thanks so much for your well-reasoned feedback; it’s definitely something I’ll continue to think about as I curate the daily Bee. I’d be lying if I said [that] you were the first (or even the second, third, or tenth to voice this complaint!
When I edit the word list for a given puzzle, my goal is to keep solvers from all walks of life in mind. Having something that is overly technical or niche us just going to mystify the many in the room [who] aren’t familiar with it, which was my logic behind recently omitting an answer like TROCAR or CHIRAL. Then again, there’s something to be said for the frustration that any solver might have upon discovering a word that isn’t accepted; you know the word, you found it, and your not … receiving any points for it?!
This is all to say: Spelling Bee is one giant balancing act so that I can make the game fun for any solver out there, regardless of background, expansive vocabulary, etc. I spend ample time vetting dictionaries of various breadths, news articles, Google NGram, you name it, to explore the commonness of all those line judge calls, some of which barely get by and others of which just miss the cut.
Also, as much as I try to avoid it, there will always be subjective bias in editing. Everyone has their different knowledge banks, and I just happen to be the one injecting mine into the word list while still always looking to make sure I keep an open mind. There are numerous times that something only barely familiar to me has been included, as my research has proven [that] the word is fair game, given my approach. The fun fact about my omission of several “science-y” terms: I actually have academic backgrounds in mechanical engineering and economics, and happen to be pretty math-y/science-y myself. You’d never know that, though, because I want to make sure [that] this game isn’t just tailored toward someone like me 😊
In any case, I’ll continue to be receptive to any sort of critique [that] solvers have about particular words, gameplay, whatever. I really do appreciate you[r] writing; if you ever have more specific suggestions to fire off, feel free to reach out to NYTCrossword@nytimes.com with your feedback!All best,Sam
LexiConnexxions claims no copyright on this content.
On June 26, 2026, Spelling Bee editor Sam Ezersky stopped in to the Spelling Bee forum to answer solvers’ questions..
TRANSCRIPT BY LEXICONNEXXIONS
Edited lightly for clarity, to divide multiple questions, and to conceal solvers’ identities.
Player Question: Do you have occasion to peek in now and then on hints from the Hive's hilariously brilliant Steve G?Sam Ezersky: Ohhhh yes. I lurk more often than you think :) Steve G, you rock … as do so many others here who join in on the fun daily.
Q: When you're curating the daily word list, do you ever look at a specific letter set and think, 'Oh, the Hive is going to absolutely love me (or hate me) for this one'? What's your biggest inspiration when you want to give us a fun challenge? SE: My reaction to reading this: MWAHAHAHAHA (Does that answer your question??) All kidding aside: Yes! It’s important, actually, to have an idea of what to expect. I feel like the core of my job is doing my best to truly understand my audience; one of the ways I do this is by putting myself in the shoes of the solver. “How should I expect to go about tackling this puzzle?” “Will I be able to enjoy it somehow, no matter my background?” Some days, a pangram or answer in the list might skew more towards the “word nerds” out there, while other days things are deliberately made more accessible. The key is always variety, so that I can do my best to offer a li’l something for everyone.
Q: How often do you read through our comments to get a feel for the community's reaction to the daily list?SE: I’m a regular lurker here.
Q: How do you decide when to introduce a new pangram (as done in about 25% of all Bees) or just use a recycled pangrams (about 3/4 of all Bees)? What's your perspective on the frequent use of E+D (in about 15% of all Bees and I+N+G (also about 15% of all Bees) but the total exclusion of E+R? Most of us have enjoyed the careful introduction of S. Data show that plurals and third-person verbs do not overwhelm the puzzle, esp with careful selection of the letter set and center letter. Any chance of getting S, say, once a month? SQUEAKY was FABULOUS. (Happy birthday!)SE: Honestly, I can answer your queries on new pangrams, E+D, I+N+G, E+R and S similarly: It all comes back to my guiding philosophy of offering variety in these puzzles. Some solvers absolutely love the breeziness of an I-N-G puzzle, while others find the repetition of I-N-G to be tedious. Ditto to the E-D combo. And the first S puzzle sort of went as I expected it to go: Many were enamored by the whole “jig is up!” effect of suddenly unleashing the elusive S, but others concurred (with me!) that these S puzzles are only delightful with a good supporting cast of interesting letters, which is trickier to string together than you might think. As for E-R: I’ve avoided this combo, because RE- and -ER words seem soooo headachy. It’s already dicey enough with UN-! At some point, as with other Spelling Bee experiments, I imagine I’m bound to give it a whirl. We shall see.
Q: If you have any influence with the design folks, can they please revise that opening invitation to "Can you find all the words selected today?"SE: I see several others here have also mentioned this … and thank you all for the feedback! It’s all helpful, and definitely something I’ll pass along to the team.
Q: When you design a Spelling Bee, do you take the day of the week, the amount of words and the difficulty into account? For example, a short easy one on Tuesdays, a short difficult one on Fridays and a long difficult one on Sundays?SE: So many different aspects determine Spelling Bee difficulty: The amount of words, the level of vocabulary (in both pangram and the surrounding list – looking at you, CALLALOO and COLCANNON!), the center letter, the possible blends and rarities of other letters … the list goes on. So, to answer your question: I try and take as much as I possibly can into account and “move the sliders,” if you will, to make a nice, varied suite of puzzles. Gerund puzzle with a rarer center letter? Let’s follow it with a multipangram, 60-plus-word effort. And maybe after that, go with a surprising pangram that might be hard to see, but the word itself just packs a fun factor on its own. Or maybe we’ll use a puzzle with a single, easy-to-see pangram, but the challenge is in finding all those long 8-plus-letter bonuses in the word list. I tend to place a pretty straightforward puzzle earlier in the week, or a puzzle that looks quite challenging later. But I’m also a sucker for surprises, so this general rule of thumb when scheduling puzzles doesn’t always apply.
Q: I guess you always start with a pangram?SE: You nailed it. To me, the pangram is the linchpin of the whole puzzle — if you don’t have a fighting chance at getting it, then what’s even the point? Before I even go about choosing which letter goes in the center, or curating the word list, I must first green-light the pangram set in the first place. A fun fact that most solvers don’t realize: How many truly *unusable* pangrams there are out there. MARGRAVIAL, anyone? INTROFY? (Lol, that highlights in red as I type it.) Chemistry lovers, would you crack CYTOKININ? With the letter set (C) I K N O T Y, I’d probably try, uh, TONICKY(???) first.
Q: I was curious as to how far ahead of time the games are curated? Going along with that, do you specifically try to curate certain lengths or difficulties for certain days of the week? SE: I typically work a few weeks ahead of time, outside of the occasional “special” puzzle I’ve been looking forward to for a while (like SQUEAKY on my birthday!). As far as difficulty goes, there’s no official formula, per se … but I tend to save the bigger, more challenging puzzles for the end of the week. And then, if there’s a bite-sized puzzle with an over-the-plate pangram, I tend to favor running it on a Monday or Tuesday. However, I’m also a fan of changing things up – I like to keep y’all on your toes! So sometimes, a week might *really* start off with a bang.
Q: Do you have an all time favorite pangram?SE: (Z) A G I N O R, which I ran a few years back. Can you find the pangram(s)? :)
Q: Would you ever consider having a puzzle where every actual word counts, rather than a curated list? I don’t mean as a daily thing though, more like a one-off for April Fools. I think this would be very enlightening as to how long a puzzle could actually be. p.s. If so, apologies to @Steve G. in advance as he will bear the brunt of providing an extremely long list of witty hints!SE: Thank you for this! In short, though, I wouldn’t wish this experience upon my worst enemy :) First of all, trust me, the puzzle would be impossible. But also, on a deeper level, there isn’t a single lexicon out there that has “all the obscure words.” Different dictionaries have different thresholds: Variant spellings, loan words, adverbial and adjectival forms of nouns and verbs, you name it. In other words, I couldn’t even create a fully comprehensive list without *someone* out there finding an additional word that isn’t there. As the game showcases to the fullest: the English language, and the ways that we define it, is arbitrary at the end of the day.
Q: How do you resolve whether you use Crosswordese or not in the Bee list? Nene, as an example.SE: Oh noooo, NOT crosswordese! Somebody please shelter me from these treacherous sailing winds (if you know, you know …). My philosophy, though, is that Spelling Bee and the Crossword have inherently different audiences. Sure, there’s plenty of overlap, but I try to contrast one from the other. As ever, some calls are ultimately going to appear arbitrary. NENE is the state bird of Hawaii, for instance, and thus commonplace to some here … so the aspect of familiarity (in the world) *combined* with the aspect of familiarity (to crossword puzzle solvers) is what juuust tips the scales for me. Other arguments for certain “crosswordy” words feel less convincing. The ultimate goal is to offer up a word list of what I *think* my audience, by and large, will guess. Language in a one-size-fits-all game is … tricky!
Q: Were you really angry after Duke beat UVA in the ACC Championship? Because you had some really difficult word lists the week after.SE: I do always chuckle when solvers assume the difficulty of a puzzle is tied to my personal life. Just coincidence … even if I *may* have been in a foul mood after my ’Hoos let me down yet again.
SE: Were you always a puzzle lover? Or is this a calling that came into your life as a happy accident?SE: I’ve been passionately into puzzles since I was around 5 or 6 years old, when I discovered a half-completed Fill-In puzzle — akin to a crossword, but with all the words instead of clues — while flipping through a waiting room magazine. Y’all, I dove riiight in. I’ll never know if I solved the puzzle correctly, but all those interlocking words were pure magic. This single moment led to me solving books upon books of Penny Press Fill-In puzzles, and from there my fascination in puzzle grids only grew. Like, I’d be sitting in the back of long car rides, in my little car seat, drawing up my own “Fill-Ins” in crayon with lord knows how many bogus words. Everything changed, though, when I discovered a copy of “Will Shortz’s Favorite Crossword Puzzles” as a tween. I’d known crosswords were much more of a Thing, but I’d only ever been able to tackle, say, the “Star Wars” or baseball clues. These grids were WILD – you can just stack three 15-letter phrases on top of each other and still get everything to work?! Many rabbit holes later, I discovered an online community of the real people behind these puzzles, and had one of my own crosswords published in The Times at 17. In 2017, I’d go on to join my idol Will Shortz at The Times (again, “Pinch me!”). Amusingly, I was already going to be a pig in mud just getting my fingerprints on these puzzles, but was told that my hiring was also due to a certain “special puzzle opportunity” down the road. You’re solving it now.
Q: What is your favorite word? Letter? And why?SE: Favorite word: One Favorite letter: S(!) … followed by Z.
LexiConnexxions claims no copyright on this content.
Player Question: Do you have occasion to peek in now and then on hints from the Hive's hilariously brilliant Steve G?Sam Ezersky: Ohhhh yes. I lurk more often than you think :) Steve G, you rock … as do so many others here who join in on the fun daily.
Q: When you're curating the daily word list, do you ever look at a specific letter set and think, 'Oh, the Hive is going to absolutely love me (or hate me) for this one'? What's your biggest inspiration when you want to give us a fun challenge? SE: My reaction to reading this: MWAHAHAHAHA (Does that answer your question??) All kidding aside: Yes! It’s important, actually, to have an idea of what to expect. I feel like the core of my job is doing my best to truly understand my audience; one of the ways I do this is by putting myself in the shoes of the solver. “How should I expect to go about tackling this puzzle?” “Will I be able to enjoy it somehow, no matter my background?” Some days, a pangram or answer in the list might skew more towards the “word nerds” out there, while other days things are deliberately made more accessible. The key is always variety, so that I can do my best to offer a li’l something for everyone.
Q: How often do you read through our comments to get a feel for the community's reaction to the daily list?SE: I’m a regular lurker here.
Q: How do you decide when to introduce a new pangram (as done in about 25% of all Bees) or just use a recycled pangrams (about 3/4 of all Bees)? What's your perspective on the frequent use of E+D (in about 15% of all Bees and I+N+G (also about 15% of all Bees) but the total exclusion of E+R? Most of us have enjoyed the careful introduction of S. Data show that plurals and third-person verbs do not overwhelm the puzzle, esp with careful selection of the letter set and center letter. Any chance of getting S, say, once a month? SQUEAKY was FABULOUS. (Happy birthday!)SE: Honestly, I can answer your queries on new pangrams, E+D, I+N+G, E+R and S similarly: It all comes back to my guiding philosophy of offering variety in these puzzles. Some solvers absolutely love the breeziness of an I-N-G puzzle, while others find the repetition of I-N-G to be tedious. Ditto to the E-D combo. And the first S puzzle sort of went as I expected it to go: Many were enamored by the whole “jig is up!” effect of suddenly unleashing the elusive S, but others concurred (with me!) that these S puzzles are only delightful with a good supporting cast of interesting letters, which is trickier to string together than you might think. As for E-R: I’ve avoided this combo, because RE- and -ER words seem soooo headachy. It’s already dicey enough with UN-! At some point, as with other Spelling Bee experiments, I imagine I’m bound to give it a whirl. We shall see.
Q: If you have any influence with the design folks, can they please revise that opening invitation to "Can you find all the words selected today?"SE: I see several others here have also mentioned this … and thank you all for the feedback! It’s all helpful, and definitely something I’ll pass along to the team.
Q: When you design a Spelling Bee, do you take the day of the week, the amount of words and the difficulty into account? For example, a short easy one on Tuesdays, a short difficult one on Fridays and a long difficult one on Sundays?SE: So many different aspects determine Spelling Bee difficulty: The amount of words, the level of vocabulary (in both pangram and the surrounding list – looking at you, CALLALOO and COLCANNON!), the center letter, the possible blends and rarities of other letters … the list goes on. So, to answer your question: I try and take as much as I possibly can into account and “move the sliders,” if you will, to make a nice, varied suite of puzzles. Gerund puzzle with a rarer center letter? Let’s follow it with a multipangram, 60-plus-word effort. And maybe after that, go with a surprising pangram that might be hard to see, but the word itself just packs a fun factor on its own. Or maybe we’ll use a puzzle with a single, easy-to-see pangram, but the challenge is in finding all those long 8-plus-letter bonuses in the word list. I tend to place a pretty straightforward puzzle earlier in the week, or a puzzle that looks quite challenging later. But I’m also a sucker for surprises, so this general rule of thumb when scheduling puzzles doesn’t always apply.
Q: I guess you always start with a pangram?SE: You nailed it. To me, the pangram is the linchpin of the whole puzzle — if you don’t have a fighting chance at getting it, then what’s even the point? Before I even go about choosing which letter goes in the center, or curating the word list, I must first green-light the pangram set in the first place. A fun fact that most solvers don’t realize: How many truly *unusable* pangrams there are out there. MARGRAVIAL, anyone? INTROFY? (Lol, that highlights in red as I type it.) Chemistry lovers, would you crack CYTOKININ? With the letter set (C) I K N O T Y, I’d probably try, uh, TONICKY(???) first.
Q: I was curious as to how far ahead of time the games are curated? Going along with that, do you specifically try to curate certain lengths or difficulties for certain days of the week? SE: I typically work a few weeks ahead of time, outside of the occasional “special” puzzle I’ve been looking forward to for a while (like SQUEAKY on my birthday!). As far as difficulty goes, there’s no official formula, per se … but I tend to save the bigger, more challenging puzzles for the end of the week. And then, if there’s a bite-sized puzzle with an over-the-plate pangram, I tend to favor running it on a Monday or Tuesday. However, I’m also a fan of changing things up – I like to keep y’all on your toes! So sometimes, a week might *really* start off with a bang.
Q: Do you have an all time favorite pangram?SE: (Z) A G I N O R, which I ran a few years back. Can you find the pangram(s)? :)
Q: Would you ever consider having a puzzle where every actual word counts, rather than a curated list? I don’t mean as a daily thing though, more like a one-off for April Fools. I think this would be very enlightening as to how long a puzzle could actually be. p.s. If so, apologies to @Steve G. in advance as he will bear the brunt of providing an extremely long list of witty hints!SE: Thank you for this! In short, though, I wouldn’t wish this experience upon my worst enemy :) First of all, trust me, the puzzle would be impossible. But also, on a deeper level, there isn’t a single lexicon out there that has “all the obscure words.” Different dictionaries have different thresholds: Variant spellings, loan words, adverbial and adjectival forms of nouns and verbs, you name it. In other words, I couldn’t even create a fully comprehensive list without *someone* out there finding an additional word that isn’t there. As the game showcases to the fullest: the English language, and the ways that we define it, is arbitrary at the end of the day.
Q: How do you resolve whether you use Crosswordese or not in the Bee list? Nene, as an example.SE: Oh noooo, NOT crosswordese! Somebody please shelter me from these treacherous sailing winds (if you know, you know …). My philosophy, though, is that Spelling Bee and the Crossword have inherently different audiences. Sure, there’s plenty of overlap, but I try to contrast one from the other. As ever, some calls are ultimately going to appear arbitrary. NENE is the state bird of Hawaii, for instance, and thus commonplace to some here … so the aspect of familiarity (in the world) *combined* with the aspect of familiarity (to crossword puzzle solvers) is what juuust tips the scales for me. Other arguments for certain “crosswordy” words feel less convincing. The ultimate goal is to offer up a word list of what I *think* my audience, by and large, will guess. Language in a one-size-fits-all game is … tricky!
Q: Were you really angry after Duke beat UVA in the ACC Championship? Because you had some really difficult word lists the week after.SE: I do always chuckle when solvers assume the difficulty of a puzzle is tied to my personal life. Just coincidence … even if I *may* have been in a foul mood after my ’Hoos let me down yet again.
SE: Were you always a puzzle lover? Or is this a calling that came into your life as a happy accident?SE: I’ve been passionately into puzzles since I was around 5 or 6 years old, when I discovered a half-completed Fill-In puzzle — akin to a crossword, but with all the words instead of clues — while flipping through a waiting room magazine. Y’all, I dove riiight in. I’ll never know if I solved the puzzle correctly, but all those interlocking words were pure magic. This single moment led to me solving books upon books of Penny Press Fill-In puzzles, and from there my fascination in puzzle grids only grew. Like, I’d be sitting in the back of long car rides, in my little car seat, drawing up my own “Fill-Ins” in crayon with lord knows how many bogus words. Everything changed, though, when I discovered a copy of “Will Shortz’s Favorite Crossword Puzzles” as a tween. I’d known crosswords were much more of a Thing, but I’d only ever been able to tackle, say, the “Star Wars” or baseball clues. These grids were WILD – you can just stack three 15-letter phrases on top of each other and still get everything to work?! Many rabbit holes later, I discovered an online community of the real people behind these puzzles, and had one of my own crosswords published in The Times at 17. In 2017, I’d go on to join my idol Will Shortz at The Times (again, “Pinch me!”). Amusingly, I was already going to be a pig in mud just getting my fingerprints on these puzzles, but was told that my hiring was also due to a certain “special puzzle opportunity” down the road. You’re solving it now.
Q: What is your favorite word? Letter? And why?SE: Favorite word: One Favorite letter: S(!) … followed by Z.
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 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.”) TRANSCRIPT BY LEXICONNEXXIONS
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.” 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.”) TRANSCRIPT BY LEXICONNEXXIONS
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.” LexiConnexxions claims no copyright on this content.
The making of the cult favorite game, “Spelling Bee” [3:45 video] [worth watching]Brut, May 22, 2022https://www.brut.media/us/entertainment/the-making-of-the-cult-favorite-game-spelling-bee--3a9b7270-9272-4861-9453-1471922c57be
Also here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gP0cV6RX2i4It’s the puzzle game everyone is obsessed with. Brut spoke to the digital puzzle editor of The New York Times on making the internet’s nerdiest word game “Spelling Bee.”
TRANSCRIPT BY LEXICONNEXXIONS The Making of the Cult Favorite: Spelling Bee
SE: I am convinced at heart that anybody can be a puzzle person. It is such a great way to scratch certain itches in your brain that you didn't know that you could scratch.
This is what it's like to be digital editor of "Spelling Bee," a New York Times word game with a cult following.
It's how many words can you find using the seven letters in each day's Hive? But the catch is that letters can be used more than once, and every word you find must include the center letter. We actually ran a Spelling Bee on Valentine's Day, and one of the pangrams was VALENTINE. Funny enough, there's also a second pangram, right? There's VENTILATE. Who knew that you could make both those words with the same seven letters? Why not? That's another 16 points your way.
Each day, Ezersky edits a list based off one or several pangrams.
Part of the editing comes with pruning the word list, I should say, which is: I am asking myself: What feels fair for a wide-spread audience? Whether you are a younger or older solver, a beginner solver or an expert, a word game maven: I want you to be able to strive for whatever Spelling Bee tier works for you. Doing my research, I have dictionaries at my disposal. [Image shows the entry for vitiate in Merriam-Webster unabridged] I do not edit this word list as a gut check. I'm simply making calls based on what the dictionaries are showing me. I like using Google's News tab a lot. My goal is to see word games and other puzzle games take a direction where they can really appeal to and employ so many different voices, so many different backgrounds so that we can continue to shape games for, truthfully, everybody out there.
Ezersky first got into word puzzles at 6. At 16, his first crossword grid was published in the Los Angeles Times.
I'm still like a kid in a candy store every time I have a puzzle published and the crosswords are how i got my start. I joke that i have an awful work life balance, because I still make crosswords in my spare time. I can't help myself; crosswords are my first love they're how I got into this. Anybody can submit a puzzle to the [New York] Times, so I have been avidly, amateurly, and then semi-professionally, been constructing puzzles since high school. I had my first puzzle published in the New York Times when I was 17 years old
Spelling Bee has existed digitally since 2018.
I could not have expected Spelling Bee -- as passionate as I am about this game -- to have been such a smashing success, a real craze in, you know, 2020, 2021, and beyond. I think it's the type of game that you want to discuss further, whether you are an avid player who picks apart the word list on a given day (which is completely fine!) or whether you're just like-- it's it is a puzzle that you can all come together and solve.
Some words won't make the cut.
For starters no vulgar slang or outright slurs; those are instant no-gos. Also -- and this seems to trip people up from time to time -- no capitalized proper names. Of course there are exceptions to this that might be confusing; did you know that "manhattan," when referring to the drink, is actually stylized lower case, per Merriam-Webster?
If a solver finds all the words in a given list, then they reach the highest rank: Queen Bee.
[There are] not too many Queen Bee solvers out there on a given day -- a very, very, very small subset -- so give yourself a pat on the back if you've ever managed to achieveQueen Bee, finding every last word out there in a given day. There's something so satisfying about just chipping away, at moving up toward success, being able to have a modal that says "Pangram!" or "Awesome!" or "this many more points, congratulations, keep going!" -- And I think there's just something so comforting about that. LexiConnexxions claims no copyright on this content.
TRANSCRIPT BY LEXICONNEXXIONS The Making of the Cult Favorite: Spelling Bee
SE: I am convinced at heart that anybody can be a puzzle person. It is such a great way to scratch certain itches in your brain that you didn't know that you could scratch.
This is what it's like to be digital editor of "Spelling Bee," a New York Times word game with a cult following.
It's how many words can you find using the seven letters in each day's Hive? But the catch is that letters can be used more than once, and every word you find must include the center letter. We actually ran a Spelling Bee on Valentine's Day, and one of the pangrams was VALENTINE. Funny enough, there's also a second pangram, right? There's VENTILATE. Who knew that you could make both those words with the same seven letters? Why not? That's another 16 points your way.
Each day, Ezersky edits a list based off one or several pangrams.
Part of the editing comes with pruning the word list, I should say, which is: I am asking myself: What feels fair for a wide-spread audience? Whether you are a younger or older solver, a beginner solver or an expert, a word game maven: I want you to be able to strive for whatever Spelling Bee tier works for you. Doing my research, I have dictionaries at my disposal. [Image shows the entry for vitiate in Merriam-Webster unabridged] I do not edit this word list as a gut check. I'm simply making calls based on what the dictionaries are showing me. I like using Google's News tab a lot. My goal is to see word games and other puzzle games take a direction where they can really appeal to and employ so many different voices, so many different backgrounds so that we can continue to shape games for, truthfully, everybody out there.
Ezersky first got into word puzzles at 6. At 16, his first crossword grid was published in the Los Angeles Times.
I'm still like a kid in a candy store every time I have a puzzle published and the crosswords are how i got my start. I joke that i have an awful work life balance, because I still make crosswords in my spare time. I can't help myself; crosswords are my first love they're how I got into this. Anybody can submit a puzzle to the [New York] Times, so I have been avidly, amateurly, and then semi-professionally, been constructing puzzles since high school. I had my first puzzle published in the New York Times when I was 17 years old
Spelling Bee has existed digitally since 2018.
I could not have expected Spelling Bee -- as passionate as I am about this game -- to have been such a smashing success, a real craze in, you know, 2020, 2021, and beyond. I think it's the type of game that you want to discuss further, whether you are an avid player who picks apart the word list on a given day (which is completely fine!) or whether you're just like-- it's it is a puzzle that you can all come together and solve.
Some words won't make the cut.
For starters no vulgar slang or outright slurs; those are instant no-gos. Also -- and this seems to trip people up from time to time -- no capitalized proper names. Of course there are exceptions to this that might be confusing; did you know that "manhattan," when referring to the drink, is actually stylized lower case, per Merriam-Webster?
If a solver finds all the words in a given list, then they reach the highest rank: Queen Bee.
[There are] not too many Queen Bee solvers out there on a given day -- a very, very, very small subset -- so give yourself a pat on the back if you've ever managed to achieveQueen Bee, finding every last word out there in a given day. There's something so satisfying about just chipping away, at moving up toward success, being able to have a modal that says "Pangram!" or "Awesome!" or "this many more points, congratulations, keep going!" -- And I think there's just something so comforting about that. LexiConnexxions claims no copyright on this content.
The Quest for Queen BeeThe Keith Law Show, November 10, 2021 (44 minutes) (SE segment begins at 5:54; SB discussion begins around 15:40; only the SB portions are transcribed below)Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/sc/podcast/the-quest-for-queen-bee-w-sam-ezersky/id1499877854?i=1000541286581Amazon Music: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/3327d6c3-f1c7-4aaf-8ea6-72a04cdcb78d/episodes/172762f4-73f1-47d4-99a0-18f0cbe86a06/the-keith-law-show-the-quest-for-%E2%80%98queen-bee%E2%80%99-w-sam-ezersky
Keith is joined by Sam Ezersky, Digital Puzzles Editor for the New York Times, to discuss their shared love of word puzzles, the highly engaging and potentially addictive ‘Spelling Bee’, Sam’s path to his current role, and the ongoing challenge of determining which words make the cut for each version of the puzzle.
TRANSCRIPT BY LEXICONNEXXIONS
SE: Seeing how people are latching on to a game like Spelling Bee-- I'm in awe, with sincerest gratitude. I get latching on to a new community, wanting to talk about the fun new puzzle that your realize so many other people are doing.
SE: Queen Bee does not happen as often as you think, despite what the internet says, it's a very very rare achievement, so if you've gotten Queen Bee at all, you are an elite solver. [NOTE: This was recorded before the Spelling Bee forum came into being, with the standardized hints and puzzle data that enabled more players to be more successful.]
Q: Where it did the Spelling Bee first come from, and when did you first realize that you had a hit?SE: I can take no credit whatsoever for the Spelling Bee or for its initial development as a digital game. [history of the print Spelling Bee (ed., Frank Longo) in the Variety Puzzles in the Sunday New York Times Magazine] The NYT Games Team were starting to develop digital games to accompany the Crossword and the Mini Crossword. I was not privy to those meetings, but Spelling Bee was an instant-- it was to be developed. Little did I know--- I knew that there were some "projects" in store for me -- that I would be placed in the editor's chair, and they would say "Do your thing, go to town, have fun." I'd solved the [print] Spelling Bee for years, and knew [the premise of that puzzle, which is] to find the super common words in the answer set, and then if you find other words, feel free to add them to your score. Obviously [laughs] the digital Spelling Bee doesn't quite work that way. You don't just want there to be some sort of unfiltered Scrabble dictionary in there, if you will, because then the word list would run wild. Think about the things you see on a Scrabble board, or playing Words with Friends, or even if you pour in a Scrabble dictionary, you want the answer key to be comprised of words that solvers do or should or perhaps might want to know or recognize. So that was early philosophy which has evolved for me over these three and a half years. I did not know that it was going to be such a smashing success. I don't think anybody really knew to expect it to take off, especially as it did during the pandemic, but I think so many people are just enjoying how much of this bite-sized game it is, that scratches the itches in their brain, that you feel smarter than you think you should, even if you are not a word person or a puzzle person, and there's lots to talk about.
Q: What works about Spelling Bee is the limited word list; it's not every possible word, not all the esoterica, not the whole Scrabble dictionary. The way to be good at Scrabble is to memorize lots of word lists. Where as with Spelling Bee, there were a few words I had to learn (callaloo!) [SE laughs] that just keep showing up again and again--SE: The dreaded callaloo.Q: Nonillion is another one. You just have to know.SE: Spelling Bee's favorite number. Of course.Q: We finally trained ourselves. Acai/Acacia.SE: That's the first blend or double-whammy that I cite when I think of those repetitive combos. I feel like they show up in every other word list that I edit.Q: Because they do. ... The beauty of this is that it's kind of finite. ... I need to know there's an end goal in sight ... [Spelling Bee] sets multiple markers; some people go for Amazing, some for Genius, some for Queen Bee. You've put structure around it that allows it to cater to multiple different audiences regardless of your skill level with puzzles or with vocabulary.SE: That's definitely part of the strategy. I've heard such lovely anecdotes over the years from solvers for whom English is not their first language, and they actually use Spelling Bee as perhaps a tool to learn and recognize more words over and over again. For perhaps that type of solver, or other solvers who are just dipping a toe into word games, your goal doesn't need to be to get to Genius or this is the be-all, end-all, you can see if you can beat your high score ... move up a level ... I hear from so many solvers who say they're just a few words off each day from Queen Bee; I feel a little guilty about that; so many solvers clamor for wanting to know the front-facing Queen Bee each day. We really want that to be more of an Easter Egg, and not to have solvers who are reaching Genius feeling that there's something incomplete and they haven't made it there. Queens, for you: If you're that much of a solving juggernaut, you're going to be fine.Q: There are multiple sites out there for folks who want to know. [mentions Bill Shunn's site as the one when you really need to get to the finish line]
Q: This must be a constant feature of your life: What words are in, and what words are out. Like callaloo. But then there are words like nori that lots of Americans have had, that's not in the Bee. How do you decide what words get in, what words are out, and does that change over time?SE: Yes it absolutely does. That's what I find so fascinating and what I'm most the sympathetic to is all the challenges that arise. The nature of this game is-- What I wished solvers knew more is that it's a binary word list, it's a yes or a no, and there's no in-between, but there are so, so many close line-judge calls that-- for anybody's personal lexicon, or if anybody were to do the exact same research that I do -- looking in dictionaries, to answer your question more concretely -- I poke around and make sure this is a word that shows up in various dictionaries, like New Oxford American, is it in Merriam-Webster, is it in the-- it probably is in the unabridged Scrabble Dictionary. I like to use N-grams as a tool, but not as a be-all, end-all, because N-grams tend to skew a little academic-y and science-y; it also doesn't catch buzzwords that people might be saying aloud more than that are written down in a google search, or maybe haven't even been -- I think I allowed "memed" as in the past tense of "to make a meme" because that's something that I hear so commonly in dialog nowadays, but I believe that is yet to make it into Merriam-Webster, meme, memed, meming? But it just makes it over the hump. It's really very arbitrary in its nature, and that's something I lament, because I don't want this to be a game where solvers feel that it is just one person's experience or one person's "Oh, this is good, and this is not good," but at the end of the day, whoever is editing the game has to draw a line somewhere and say "I'm not so sure about this one." My guiding question is what feels-- I used to use the label "common" because, you know what's a common word, what's not common? But I don't actually think that's fair especially with just one person editing the puzzle, because one person's -- part of their background or their culture or their everyday experience might be another person's esoterica. My guiding question is for a wide-ranging audience, those who reach Queen, those who reach Solid, those who live here, those who live there, those who don't even live in the U.S., what feels fair for our wide-spread audience? And some things just miss the mark. I actually went ahead and added nori, so you'll find it in there the next time. If you're asking me why [nori] did not make it in, versus why did callaloo [make it in] right off the bat? I'm not exactly sure. The honest answer is I don't really know, because you can stack up any sort of-- I hear from solvers all the time, "Why this word, but not that word?" And I look at each word individually, and kind of-- you know, I can use some sort of metric, like "Well, I allow this one, so maybe I should allow this one too" but I'm not entirely sure. I think at the time -- I'm merely speculating, don't take this as fact -- but I think what must have happened is that nori must not have been listed in one of the major dictionaries and so-- There's also the question of what is a word that is firmly in the English language lexicon, versus what is purely a loan word or a word that you would see written in a different language that you wouldn't quite call English? So that is a question that-- I am not a lexicographer. I don't feel good about making a finite answer on that, I'm just using the tools at my disposal and saying "I think this one" or "I think I'm going to leave this one off," but I do want to hear what solvers have to say. And I'm I'm always going to keep my eyes and ears out, because there's no be-all, end-all here.
Q: [mentions a word from a branded board game] I checked, it's not in Merriam-Webster. So apparently I have to fight them first, and then I can come at you.SE: Fight the dictionaries before you fight me. I am not here sitting in some-- My goal is not to be sitting here in some talk show with a big rubber stamp, big thumbs down. I do just enough so that I think I can build a case. Things absolutely slip through the words, like actual common --- Just a couple weeks ago, omg, I stayed off Twitter for a long time after UNDAUNTED -- a clear oversight -- I got nothin' -- this was not a choice -- Every once in a while I make a mistake. I genuinely apologized if it marred your solving experience. You fix it for next time; it will be in there the next time those letters appear. To answer your second question, it is a constantly evolving experience, because I do want solvers -- and not just the loudest solvers in the room -- to feel that they are being heard and listened to, because this game is ultimately shaped by what do I think my audience knows or what feels to offer my audience -- "Hey, this is a word in the word list, it counts against your score, it's that much more-- if you don't see it, it's that many points you won't have, and it also increases the total score of the game, but also it's that many points that you'll get if you do know it." I want to be receptive to those experiences that solvers have, especially some close to the bone... we take it from there. LexiConnexxions claims no copyright on this content.
SE: Queen Bee does not happen as often as you think, despite what the internet says, it's a very very rare achievement, so if you've gotten Queen Bee at all, you are an elite solver. [NOTE: This was recorded before the Spelling Bee forum came into being, with the standardized hints and puzzle data that enabled more players to be more successful.]
Q: Where it did the Spelling Bee first come from, and when did you first realize that you had a hit?SE: I can take no credit whatsoever for the Spelling Bee or for its initial development as a digital game. [history of the print Spelling Bee (ed., Frank Longo) in the Variety Puzzles in the Sunday New York Times Magazine] The NYT Games Team were starting to develop digital games to accompany the Crossword and the Mini Crossword. I was not privy to those meetings, but Spelling Bee was an instant-- it was to be developed. Little did I know--- I knew that there were some "projects" in store for me -- that I would be placed in the editor's chair, and they would say "Do your thing, go to town, have fun." I'd solved the [print] Spelling Bee for years, and knew [the premise of that puzzle, which is] to find the super common words in the answer set, and then if you find other words, feel free to add them to your score. Obviously [laughs] the digital Spelling Bee doesn't quite work that way. You don't just want there to be some sort of unfiltered Scrabble dictionary in there, if you will, because then the word list would run wild. Think about the things you see on a Scrabble board, or playing Words with Friends, or even if you pour in a Scrabble dictionary, you want the answer key to be comprised of words that solvers do or should or perhaps might want to know or recognize. So that was early philosophy which has evolved for me over these three and a half years. I did not know that it was going to be such a smashing success. I don't think anybody really knew to expect it to take off, especially as it did during the pandemic, but I think so many people are just enjoying how much of this bite-sized game it is, that scratches the itches in their brain, that you feel smarter than you think you should, even if you are not a word person or a puzzle person, and there's lots to talk about.
Q: What works about Spelling Bee is the limited word list; it's not every possible word, not all the esoterica, not the whole Scrabble dictionary. The way to be good at Scrabble is to memorize lots of word lists. Where as with Spelling Bee, there were a few words I had to learn (callaloo!) [SE laughs] that just keep showing up again and again--SE: The dreaded callaloo.Q: Nonillion is another one. You just have to know.SE: Spelling Bee's favorite number. Of course.Q: We finally trained ourselves. Acai/Acacia.SE: That's the first blend or double-whammy that I cite when I think of those repetitive combos. I feel like they show up in every other word list that I edit.Q: Because they do. ... The beauty of this is that it's kind of finite. ... I need to know there's an end goal in sight ... [Spelling Bee] sets multiple markers; some people go for Amazing, some for Genius, some for Queen Bee. You've put structure around it that allows it to cater to multiple different audiences regardless of your skill level with puzzles or with vocabulary.SE: That's definitely part of the strategy. I've heard such lovely anecdotes over the years from solvers for whom English is not their first language, and they actually use Spelling Bee as perhaps a tool to learn and recognize more words over and over again. For perhaps that type of solver, or other solvers who are just dipping a toe into word games, your goal doesn't need to be to get to Genius or this is the be-all, end-all, you can see if you can beat your high score ... move up a level ... I hear from so many solvers who say they're just a few words off each day from Queen Bee; I feel a little guilty about that; so many solvers clamor for wanting to know the front-facing Queen Bee each day. We really want that to be more of an Easter Egg, and not to have solvers who are reaching Genius feeling that there's something incomplete and they haven't made it there. Queens, for you: If you're that much of a solving juggernaut, you're going to be fine.Q: There are multiple sites out there for folks who want to know. [mentions Bill Shunn's site as the one when you really need to get to the finish line]
Q: This must be a constant feature of your life: What words are in, and what words are out. Like callaloo. But then there are words like nori that lots of Americans have had, that's not in the Bee. How do you decide what words get in, what words are out, and does that change over time?SE: Yes it absolutely does. That's what I find so fascinating and what I'm most the sympathetic to is all the challenges that arise. The nature of this game is-- What I wished solvers knew more is that it's a binary word list, it's a yes or a no, and there's no in-between, but there are so, so many close line-judge calls that-- for anybody's personal lexicon, or if anybody were to do the exact same research that I do -- looking in dictionaries, to answer your question more concretely -- I poke around and make sure this is a word that shows up in various dictionaries, like New Oxford American, is it in Merriam-Webster, is it in the-- it probably is in the unabridged Scrabble Dictionary. I like to use N-grams as a tool, but not as a be-all, end-all, because N-grams tend to skew a little academic-y and science-y; it also doesn't catch buzzwords that people might be saying aloud more than that are written down in a google search, or maybe haven't even been -- I think I allowed "memed" as in the past tense of "to make a meme" because that's something that I hear so commonly in dialog nowadays, but I believe that is yet to make it into Merriam-Webster, meme, memed, meming? But it just makes it over the hump. It's really very arbitrary in its nature, and that's something I lament, because I don't want this to be a game where solvers feel that it is just one person's experience or one person's "Oh, this is good, and this is not good," but at the end of the day, whoever is editing the game has to draw a line somewhere and say "I'm not so sure about this one." My guiding question is what feels-- I used to use the label "common" because, you know what's a common word, what's not common? But I don't actually think that's fair especially with just one person editing the puzzle, because one person's -- part of their background or their culture or their everyday experience might be another person's esoterica. My guiding question is for a wide-ranging audience, those who reach Queen, those who reach Solid, those who live here, those who live there, those who don't even live in the U.S., what feels fair for our wide-spread audience? And some things just miss the mark. I actually went ahead and added nori, so you'll find it in there the next time. If you're asking me why [nori] did not make it in, versus why did callaloo [make it in] right off the bat? I'm not exactly sure. The honest answer is I don't really know, because you can stack up any sort of-- I hear from solvers all the time, "Why this word, but not that word?" And I look at each word individually, and kind of-- you know, I can use some sort of metric, like "Well, I allow this one, so maybe I should allow this one too" but I'm not entirely sure. I think at the time -- I'm merely speculating, don't take this as fact -- but I think what must have happened is that nori must not have been listed in one of the major dictionaries and so-- There's also the question of what is a word that is firmly in the English language lexicon, versus what is purely a loan word or a word that you would see written in a different language that you wouldn't quite call English? So that is a question that-- I am not a lexicographer. I don't feel good about making a finite answer on that, I'm just using the tools at my disposal and saying "I think this one" or "I think I'm going to leave this one off," but I do want to hear what solvers have to say. And I'm I'm always going to keep my eyes and ears out, because there's no be-all, end-all here.
Q: [mentions a word from a branded board game] I checked, it's not in Merriam-Webster. So apparently I have to fight them first, and then I can come at you.SE: Fight the dictionaries before you fight me. I am not here sitting in some-- My goal is not to be sitting here in some talk show with a big rubber stamp, big thumbs down. I do just enough so that I think I can build a case. Things absolutely slip through the words, like actual common --- Just a couple weeks ago, omg, I stayed off Twitter for a long time after UNDAUNTED -- a clear oversight -- I got nothin' -- this was not a choice -- Every once in a while I make a mistake. I genuinely apologized if it marred your solving experience. You fix it for next time; it will be in there the next time those letters appear. To answer your second question, it is a constantly evolving experience, because I do want solvers -- and not just the loudest solvers in the room -- to feel that they are being heard and listened to, because this game is ultimately shaped by what do I think my audience knows or what feels to offer my audience -- "Hey, this is a word in the word list, it counts against your score, it's that much more-- if you don't see it, it's that many points you won't have, and it also increases the total score of the game, but also it's that many points that you'll get if you do know it." I want to be receptive to those experiences that solvers have, especially some close to the bone... we take it from there. LexiConnexxions claims no copyright on this content.