Resources: What Sam Says About (Nearly) Everything
The Spelling Bee had its début on May 9, 2018. In those early days, The New York Times provided almost no information about the puzzle, and players had no official guidance on scoring structure, solving goals, the role of its editor, the source(s) of words, or anything else.
It was not until more than two years later (October 2020), that The Times published its first article about the Bee; that and their next article (December 2021) reported on players’ experiences, but did not offer information from the Bee editor, Sam Ezersky, that might answer players’ continuing questions about the puzzle itself. It was not until early August 2022 – more than four years after the début of the Spelling Bee – that the Times invited players to submit questions to the Bee editor; those Qs and As were published in an article later that month.
During those early years, the Bee editor did sometimes share bits of information in social media posts and in rare comments posted to the nascent Spelling Bee forum (it existed in a corner of Wordplay, the daily crossword column, before getting its own home in 2021). He also participated in several extensive interviews that were published in other print media, podcasts, etc. In the absence of official published information, Bee solvers tended to rely on those posts and interviews as the best sources of information about the Bee.
Though The Times has published more information about the Spelling Bee in recent years, much of that material has been informal and entertaining, rather than elucidating, and Bee solvers have continued to look to outside resources for guidance and information.
To make it easier for Bee solvers to find those elusive snippets of information, LexiConnexxions has prepared this compilation, “What Sam Says About (Nearly) Everything.” From our comprehensive bibliography of Spelling Bee resources, we identified 38 important items – articles, interviews, social media posts, podcasts – in which Sam Ezersky provided substantial information directly to interviewers, colleagues, or players.
We extracted those quotes and organized them here by subject, so that a reader may see, for example, all quotes from the Bee editor as to which dictionaries and other resources he has named as relevant to the Bee. The list of topics is shown in the sidebar.
Within each of the subject headings, the entries are arranged by date (earliest first), so that a reader may see at a glance how the editor’s thinking might have changed over time. The date is also the key to the resources themselves, which are listed at the bottom of this page, also arranged by date. To find the source of a particular quote, note the date, then check for that date in the resource list.
Many of these entries have been edited lightly for clarity, or to remove speech artifacts (um, like, you know) from verbatim transcripts of live interviews. In many cases, long statements that touch on more than one subject have been divided and/or duplicated into relevant subject headings. LexiConnexxions has added clarifying information [square brackets] as needed.
This compilation will be updated as new information becomes available.
It was not until more than two years later (October 2020), that The Times published its first article about the Bee; that and their next article (December 2021) reported on players’ experiences, but did not offer information from the Bee editor, Sam Ezersky, that might answer players’ continuing questions about the puzzle itself. It was not until early August 2022 – more than four years after the début of the Spelling Bee – that the Times invited players to submit questions to the Bee editor; those Qs and As were published in an article later that month.
During those early years, the Bee editor did sometimes share bits of information in social media posts and in rare comments posted to the nascent Spelling Bee forum (it existed in a corner of Wordplay, the daily crossword column, before getting its own home in 2021). He also participated in several extensive interviews that were published in other print media, podcasts, etc. In the absence of official published information, Bee solvers tended to rely on those posts and interviews as the best sources of information about the Bee.
Though The Times has published more information about the Spelling Bee in recent years, much of that material has been informal and entertaining, rather than elucidating, and Bee solvers have continued to look to outside resources for guidance and information.
To make it easier for Bee solvers to find those elusive snippets of information, LexiConnexxions has prepared this compilation, “What Sam Says About (Nearly) Everything.” From our comprehensive bibliography of Spelling Bee resources, we identified 38 important items – articles, interviews, social media posts, podcasts – in which Sam Ezersky provided substantial information directly to interviewers, colleagues, or players.
We extracted those quotes and organized them here by subject, so that a reader may see, for example, all quotes from the Bee editor as to which dictionaries and other resources he has named as relevant to the Bee. The list of topics is shown in the sidebar.
Within each of the subject headings, the entries are arranged by date (earliest first), so that a reader may see at a glance how the editor’s thinking might have changed over time. The date is also the key to the resources themselves, which are listed at the bottom of this page, also arranged by date. To find the source of a particular quote, note the date, then check for that date in the resource list.
Many of these entries have been edited lightly for clarity, or to remove speech artifacts (um, like, you know) from verbatim transcripts of live interviews. In many cases, long statements that touch on more than one subject have been divided and/or duplicated into relevant subject headings. LexiConnexxions has added clarifying information [square brackets] as needed.
This compilation will be updated as new information becomes available.
Community and Feedback
If you cite information from this LexiConnexxions report, please give credit and a link to this page. These reports and analyses are compiled and prepared by a human being, not a machine. Thank you.
What Sam Says About (Nearly) Everything: Topics
Community and FeedbackDictionaries and Other ResourcesEditing: Pangram SelectionEditing: Testing PanelEditing: Variety and SchedulingEditing: Word SelectionEditorial RoleLexicon: Capitals, Hyphens, etc.Lexicon: CrosswordeseLexicon: Foreign Words, British, etc.Lexicon: General InformationLexicon: Ins and OutsLexicon: Slang, Vulgarities, etc.Player Experience: DifficultyPlayer Experience: EnjoymentPlayer Experience: RanksPlayer Experience: Solving TipsPuzzle Tech and InterfaceSpecial Puzzles
2019-07-16I’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!
2021-08-31AQ: If you check out the whole hive mind discourse, regardless of whether it was an easy day or a difficult day, there’s always so much chatter about every little thing, about why was this word accepted? Why was this word I’ve never heard of accepted? Do you just ignore all of that chatter or are you actually going in there and looking for that constructive criticism about how you might shape your word list and say, oh, yeah, OK, that was a judgment call to keep it out? Maybe I should put that in.SE: Listen up. Hive mind. I do listen to what you have to say. Even if I want to plug my ears and go, oh, my gosh, I’m getting absolutely dragged for this word. That’s part of the responsibility of being in this role. I check my notifications less than I used to because I know I’m going to wake up every day with a whole barrage of who knows what. But no, I mean, the feedback’s important. Right. And it’s also that’s part of the fiber of this game, is that everybody-- And the irony of the role that I am in is because everybody has their own personal lexicon at the end of the day. Everybody has their own: “Well, why this word? But not that word” to some degree, whether you are an expert solver or heck, even my mom and dad have come to me gone like really? You know how this one and I’m like, oh, no, you guys aren’t even like the heavy with the diehards that are that I hear from the most here. So this game really trickles down to everybody in that sense. My role especially is just being the sole person behind this. I don’t want to be I have been called, you know, a gatekeeper or a czar, if you will. That is not my goal, even if that’s just, you know, part of what comes with the game. I want to be leading the #hivemind and shaping this game based off really what I hear. I think it’s really important to take that stuff to heart and into consideration in future puzzles. Nobody outright gets ignored. I just I just might disagree at the end of the day
2021-08-31AQ: They call it the hive mind, but it’s really just kind of grown into epic proportions, like you say, since the pandemic. And now the Times has launched a daily discussion forum just for Spelling Bee fans. And they have their own lingo when they’re talking about it. So what is it like being responsible for something that attracts such a diehard community?SE: It’s so rewarding. It is exhilarating to be able to hear from so many people, people with all sorts of walks of life, people with all sorts of different affinities for word games or puzzles in general. There might be someone I’ve heard from that I hear from every day who’s clearly, you know, some just expert wordsmith, pointing out this of this crazy Scrabble word that I probably couldn’t allow to these, you know, the newer sorts that are just like, oh, hey, I didn’t know that Queen Bee existed. What’s this all about? Why don’t you all post the Queen Bee score? Now, I’m never going to put this thing down. It’s definitely feels like there’s a lot of weight on my shoulders. There’s a ton of responsibility. I’m one person shaping a one size fits all wordlist for everybody, which in itself is going to be arbitrary, as the biggest critics say, of course it’s arbitrary, but I really have such a blast doing this. I take all the feedback I get to heart because I feel like that is part of my role, except for the negative. I’m on the lookout for this. I could never have expected this. I really did not know that this was going to blossom into such a subculture with such an ardent following. And I, you know, just get to participate in this now as well.
2021-08-31BQ: Regardless of how hard the pangram is, if you go on Twitter and you check out the whole hive-mind discourse, regardless of whether it was an easy day or a difficult day, there’s always so much chatter about every little thing. Why wasn’t this word accepted? Why was this word I’ve never heard of accepted? Do you just ignore all that chatter? Or are you actually going in there and looking for constructive criticism about how you might shape your word list?SE: Listen up, hive mind, I do listen to what you have to say. Even if I want to plug my ears and go, “Oh my gosh, I’m getting absolutely dragged for this word.” That’s part of the responsibility of being in this role. I check my notifications less than I used to, because I know I’m going to wake up every day with a whole barrage of who knows what. But the feedback’s important.
2021-11-10SE: …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.
2021-11-10Things 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.
2022-04-19[Bee excluded “undaunted” on 2021-10-14] [author]: I ask him about “undaunted” and then immediately feel bad: it turns out to have been a mistake. The computer generates a lot of “un” words that aren’t ever used, and he must have accidentally lopped “undaunted” off along with the others. The reader reaction was far more intense than my Twitter feed’s, it turns out. “It grew into something that felt larger than missing a word in a puzzle”, making Ezersky anxious and miserable. “Part of it, looking back, was the sheer abundance,” he says, “and part of it was the incredulity…‘how dare you?’ It was like –excuse my French – ‘you fucking idiot!’” Ezersky has deleted Twitter from his phone.
2022-04-19At least Merriam-Webster only has to contend with haters every few years; Ezersky faces them every day. After Spelling Bee is published each day, scores of people email the New York Times complaining about words that it did or didn’t take. Several Twitter accounts with names like “Not a Spelling Bee Word” exist purely to troll Ezersky. When the puzzle didn’t accept the word “raffia” (a decision since overturned) one frustrated player sent yards of the material to the New York Times’s office in protest, along with a threat to follow up with an ortolan (“animals are so dicey”, sighs Ezersky). His biggest critics are members of the sailing community, who rage at him each time he doesn’t accept “alee” (the side of a ship which is sheltered from wind, and a handy one-pointer). Ezersky takes the complaints to heart and often revises his policy if a reader makes a good case: “I’m committed to making this a game for the people.” It’s easier to say what may be “common” to print readers, he says, than to a diverse and geographically dispersed digital audience.
2022-08-14Q: The Bee has a large, devoted audience. How important is it for you to connect with them?SE: Without an audience playing these puzzles, what’s the point? I love the way this community has organically formed. It started with a few people posting their Bee screenshots. Then I tweeted out the #HiveMind hashtag. Now we have a forum that has more comments than I could have ever imagined. It’s staggering to see how many people care about this game and seek it to find joy in their days. Hearing feedback from the community fuels me to do my best.
2022-12-01Q: This game has been such a source of entertainment and joy and community for people during the pandemic. What has that been like?SE: Absolutely staggering, to be completely honest with you. People love this. Spelling Bee, in my mind, has stood for a larger period, a time where we craved so much, where we had to be inside our apartments or physical spaces and couldn’t go out and do anything, at a time where we needed a diversion from the daily news, out comes this game that is just telling you, hey, you’re doing great. Keep going. I’ve received so many touching stories along the way, just about somebody who, while they were in the U.S. and their parents lived abroad, Spelling Bee was a great way for them to stay connected. They would always compare their answers every day from, you know, time zones far apart. Someone would get up super early while the other person was going to bed in their own time zone, just so they could have this daily connection. Knowing the larger implications of this being more than just a game is what really drives the passion that fuels me to be my best. At the end of the day, knowing people’s reactions to this game and how much it means to them is what makes it so lovely for me and makes me have so much fun with it, because I want to continue to infuse that passion to recycle it back to all these solvers out there who just love doing what I’m doing.
2022-12-01Q: What are the most common “why wasn’t this word accepted?” complaints? What are the most common “why was this word accepted?” complaints?SE: I will receive complaints that this puzzle, for all the foods it allows, it clearly doesn’t recognize science, or something like that. And then I’ll get a similar complaint from someone saying, this is so darn unfairly science-heavy, which leaves me in the dust, but why does it not allow any of these foods that I know? The most common complaints tend to be around words that people recognize from doing crosswords over and over again, that I don’t like to add in the Spelling Bee because I believe it’s a different experience. Sometimes I spend up to an hour going back and forth on just a single word alone, going, like well, this is damned if I do, damned if I don’t. People are absolutely going to know this, and they’re going to flame me on the internet. But if I do allow it, people are going to be going, what the heck is that?
2022-12-29Mr. Ezersky reads the forum, he said in an email — and so do his parents, mainly because he won’t give them hints — and he does take players’ feedback into account. But he reads for other reasons, too. “That’s actually the main reason why I lurk,” Mr. Ezersky said. “It’s not primarily to collect feedback on the word list itself, but to truly immerse myself in the community. What conversations take place in and around the game? What role does it have in our daily lives? How does it bring us all together?” He added, “Not only is it all delightful to witness, but staggering.”
2023-11-21Q: I’m going to ask you a question that some people have asked me to ask you …SE: Is it the S?Q. 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) [COPE was left out of the Bee on Sep 3, 2020, during the pandemic], 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 Merriam-Webster 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.
2023-11-21Q: 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
2023-11-21SE: Hivemind’s got some powerful, um, powerful [unintelligible]Q: 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.Q: Oh, passionate. Okay.SE: Passionate. OK, how do I cope?Q: 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.
2023-12-19[After its launch in 2018, Spelling Bee] gained a “small die-hard following,” Ezersky says, “but what I thought was growth and popularity paled in comparison to what happened just after the onset of the pandemic.”
2024-04-30SE: What are some of the most surprising, funny, fascinating moments since I’ve been editing Spelling Bee? Let me tell you, there’s so much to choose from. So originally the word RAFFIA was omitted from the Spelling Bee word list. My mistake! Somebody shipped 72 yards of raffia in a coil ordered off Amazon to me saying “Hey, this is raffia, you should add this to the word list!” You guys are so funny! I’m also thinking about some goofy pangrams or words normally accepted in the game, like BACKROOM: Everybody just found BARACKOBAMA instead. I can’t just add the name of a former president to the word list. Another pangram was HANDBOOK but everybody seemed to find BADONKADONK. And then of course there are some of the words that actually should have been in there. My word list was not, shall we say, up to date, and didn’t have the pangram CLICKBAIT on a day that those letters ran. And Steve Martin, the great Steve Martin tweeted out, saying, “Hey New York Times, you need to get out more.” It was really embarrassing at first, but now I just find this sort of thing hysterical. The degree of creativity that the #Hivemind has is unparallelled. Not anything that I ever could have expected when I started editing this game.
2024-05-03ASE: So, if you’ve ever popped by our daily Spelling Bee forum on Wordplay, you’re probably seeing the most top-liked comment is from this guy STEVE G. Steve G gives comprehensive hints at like 0:dark:30 for every single word that you can find in that day’s puzzle. It is fascinating! And Steve G isn’t even alone, there are actually many of you who pop by to leave your hints on the day’s puzzle, however early, just to help each other out. The hints themselves are amazing, less work for me to do, you all can figure it out on your own! But also, it’s just another indicator of how supportive and cohesive this #hivemind community is.
2024-05-03BSE: [B&W, ominous music] I’m actually pretty surprised that the New York Times is letting me say what I’ve gotta get off my chest right now. [pause] STEVE G, if you’re listening, I have an important message to deliver. How do I put this? [pause] [color, upbeat music] Thank you! Thank you for everything that you are doing for us! Your work is amazing, you get up at 0:dark:30, you blitz this puzzle every day, your hints are bangers, everybody gets to Queen now, you absolutely open the flood gates, we all are inspired to make hints of our own, we all want to lift each other up, thanks to you, my man!
2026-06-26Q: Do you have occasion to peek in now and then on hints from the Hive's hilariously brilliant Steve G?SE: 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.
2026-06-26Q: 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.
2021-08-31AQ: If you check out the whole hive mind discourse, regardless of whether it was an easy day or a difficult day, there’s always so much chatter about every little thing, about why was this word accepted? Why was this word I’ve never heard of accepted? Do you just ignore all of that chatter or are you actually going in there and looking for that constructive criticism about how you might shape your word list and say, oh, yeah, OK, that was a judgment call to keep it out? Maybe I should put that in.SE: Listen up. Hive mind. I do listen to what you have to say. Even if I want to plug my ears and go, oh, my gosh, I’m getting absolutely dragged for this word. That’s part of the responsibility of being in this role. I check my notifications less than I used to because I know I’m going to wake up every day with a whole barrage of who knows what. But no, I mean, the feedback’s important. Right. And it’s also that’s part of the fiber of this game, is that everybody-- And the irony of the role that I am in is because everybody has their own personal lexicon at the end of the day. Everybody has their own: “Well, why this word? But not that word” to some degree, whether you are an expert solver or heck, even my mom and dad have come to me gone like really? You know how this one and I’m like, oh, no, you guys aren’t even like the heavy with the diehards that are that I hear from the most here. So this game really trickles down to everybody in that sense. My role especially is just being the sole person behind this. I don’t want to be I have been called, you know, a gatekeeper or a czar, if you will. That is not my goal, even if that’s just, you know, part of what comes with the game. I want to be leading the #hivemind and shaping this game based off really what I hear. I think it’s really important to take that stuff to heart and into consideration in future puzzles. Nobody outright gets ignored. I just I just might disagree at the end of the day
2021-08-31AQ: They call it the hive mind, but it’s really just kind of grown into epic proportions, like you say, since the pandemic. And now the Times has launched a daily discussion forum just for Spelling Bee fans. And they have their own lingo when they’re talking about it. So what is it like being responsible for something that attracts such a diehard community?SE: It’s so rewarding. It is exhilarating to be able to hear from so many people, people with all sorts of walks of life, people with all sorts of different affinities for word games or puzzles in general. There might be someone I’ve heard from that I hear from every day who’s clearly, you know, some just expert wordsmith, pointing out this of this crazy Scrabble word that I probably couldn’t allow to these, you know, the newer sorts that are just like, oh, hey, I didn’t know that Queen Bee existed. What’s this all about? Why don’t you all post the Queen Bee score? Now, I’m never going to put this thing down. It’s definitely feels like there’s a lot of weight on my shoulders. There’s a ton of responsibility. I’m one person shaping a one size fits all wordlist for everybody, which in itself is going to be arbitrary, as the biggest critics say, of course it’s arbitrary, but I really have such a blast doing this. I take all the feedback I get to heart because I feel like that is part of my role, except for the negative. I’m on the lookout for this. I could never have expected this. I really did not know that this was going to blossom into such a subculture with such an ardent following. And I, you know, just get to participate in this now as well.
2021-08-31BQ: Regardless of how hard the pangram is, if you go on Twitter and you check out the whole hive-mind discourse, regardless of whether it was an easy day or a difficult day, there’s always so much chatter about every little thing. Why wasn’t this word accepted? Why was this word I’ve never heard of accepted? Do you just ignore all that chatter? Or are you actually going in there and looking for constructive criticism about how you might shape your word list?SE: Listen up, hive mind, I do listen to what you have to say. Even if I want to plug my ears and go, “Oh my gosh, I’m getting absolutely dragged for this word.” That’s part of the responsibility of being in this role. I check my notifications less than I used to, because I know I’m going to wake up every day with a whole barrage of who knows what. But the feedback’s important.
2021-11-10SE: …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.
2021-11-10Things 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.
2022-04-19[Bee excluded “undaunted” on 2021-10-14] [author]: I ask him about “undaunted” and then immediately feel bad: it turns out to have been a mistake. The computer generates a lot of “un” words that aren’t ever used, and he must have accidentally lopped “undaunted” off along with the others. The reader reaction was far more intense than my Twitter feed’s, it turns out. “It grew into something that felt larger than missing a word in a puzzle”, making Ezersky anxious and miserable. “Part of it, looking back, was the sheer abundance,” he says, “and part of it was the incredulity…‘how dare you?’ It was like –excuse my French – ‘you fucking idiot!’” Ezersky has deleted Twitter from his phone.
2022-04-19At least Merriam-Webster only has to contend with haters every few years; Ezersky faces them every day. After Spelling Bee is published each day, scores of people email the New York Times complaining about words that it did or didn’t take. Several Twitter accounts with names like “Not a Spelling Bee Word” exist purely to troll Ezersky. When the puzzle didn’t accept the word “raffia” (a decision since overturned) one frustrated player sent yards of the material to the New York Times’s office in protest, along with a threat to follow up with an ortolan (“animals are so dicey”, sighs Ezersky). His biggest critics are members of the sailing community, who rage at him each time he doesn’t accept “alee” (the side of a ship which is sheltered from wind, and a handy one-pointer). Ezersky takes the complaints to heart and often revises his policy if a reader makes a good case: “I’m committed to making this a game for the people.” It’s easier to say what may be “common” to print readers, he says, than to a diverse and geographically dispersed digital audience.
2022-08-14Q: The Bee has a large, devoted audience. How important is it for you to connect with them?SE: Without an audience playing these puzzles, what’s the point? I love the way this community has organically formed. It started with a few people posting their Bee screenshots. Then I tweeted out the #HiveMind hashtag. Now we have a forum that has more comments than I could have ever imagined. It’s staggering to see how many people care about this game and seek it to find joy in their days. Hearing feedback from the community fuels me to do my best.
2022-12-01Q: This game has been such a source of entertainment and joy and community for people during the pandemic. What has that been like?SE: Absolutely staggering, to be completely honest with you. People love this. Spelling Bee, in my mind, has stood for a larger period, a time where we craved so much, where we had to be inside our apartments or physical spaces and couldn’t go out and do anything, at a time where we needed a diversion from the daily news, out comes this game that is just telling you, hey, you’re doing great. Keep going. I’ve received so many touching stories along the way, just about somebody who, while they were in the U.S. and their parents lived abroad, Spelling Bee was a great way for them to stay connected. They would always compare their answers every day from, you know, time zones far apart. Someone would get up super early while the other person was going to bed in their own time zone, just so they could have this daily connection. Knowing the larger implications of this being more than just a game is what really drives the passion that fuels me to be my best. At the end of the day, knowing people’s reactions to this game and how much it means to them is what makes it so lovely for me and makes me have so much fun with it, because I want to continue to infuse that passion to recycle it back to all these solvers out there who just love doing what I’m doing.
2022-12-01Q: What are the most common “why wasn’t this word accepted?” complaints? What are the most common “why was this word accepted?” complaints?SE: I will receive complaints that this puzzle, for all the foods it allows, it clearly doesn’t recognize science, or something like that. And then I’ll get a similar complaint from someone saying, this is so darn unfairly science-heavy, which leaves me in the dust, but why does it not allow any of these foods that I know? The most common complaints tend to be around words that people recognize from doing crosswords over and over again, that I don’t like to add in the Spelling Bee because I believe it’s a different experience. Sometimes I spend up to an hour going back and forth on just a single word alone, going, like well, this is damned if I do, damned if I don’t. People are absolutely going to know this, and they’re going to flame me on the internet. But if I do allow it, people are going to be going, what the heck is that?
2022-12-29Mr. Ezersky reads the forum, he said in an email — and so do his parents, mainly because he won’t give them hints — and he does take players’ feedback into account. But he reads for other reasons, too. “That’s actually the main reason why I lurk,” Mr. Ezersky said. “It’s not primarily to collect feedback on the word list itself, but to truly immerse myself in the community. What conversations take place in and around the game? What role does it have in our daily lives? How does it bring us all together?” He added, “Not only is it all delightful to witness, but staggering.”
2023-11-21Q: I’m going to ask you a question that some people have asked me to ask you …SE: Is it the S?Q. 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) [COPE was left out of the Bee on Sep 3, 2020, during the pandemic], 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 Merriam-Webster 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.
2023-11-21Q: 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
2023-11-21SE: Hivemind’s got some powerful, um, powerful [unintelligible]Q: 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.Q: Oh, passionate. Okay.SE: Passionate. OK, how do I cope?Q: 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.
2023-12-19[After its launch in 2018, Spelling Bee] gained a “small die-hard following,” Ezersky says, “but what I thought was growth and popularity paled in comparison to what happened just after the onset of the pandemic.”
2024-04-30SE: What are some of the most surprising, funny, fascinating moments since I’ve been editing Spelling Bee? Let me tell you, there’s so much to choose from. So originally the word RAFFIA was omitted from the Spelling Bee word list. My mistake! Somebody shipped 72 yards of raffia in a coil ordered off Amazon to me saying “Hey, this is raffia, you should add this to the word list!” You guys are so funny! I’m also thinking about some goofy pangrams or words normally accepted in the game, like BACKROOM: Everybody just found BARACKOBAMA instead. I can’t just add the name of a former president to the word list. Another pangram was HANDBOOK but everybody seemed to find BADONKADONK. And then of course there are some of the words that actually should have been in there. My word list was not, shall we say, up to date, and didn’t have the pangram CLICKBAIT on a day that those letters ran. And Steve Martin, the great Steve Martin tweeted out, saying, “Hey New York Times, you need to get out more.” It was really embarrassing at first, but now I just find this sort of thing hysterical. The degree of creativity that the #Hivemind has is unparallelled. Not anything that I ever could have expected when I started editing this game.
2024-05-03ASE: So, if you’ve ever popped by our daily Spelling Bee forum on Wordplay, you’re probably seeing the most top-liked comment is from this guy STEVE G. Steve G gives comprehensive hints at like 0:dark:30 for every single word that you can find in that day’s puzzle. It is fascinating! And Steve G isn’t even alone, there are actually many of you who pop by to leave your hints on the day’s puzzle, however early, just to help each other out. The hints themselves are amazing, less work for me to do, you all can figure it out on your own! But also, it’s just another indicator of how supportive and cohesive this #hivemind community is.
2024-05-03BSE: [B&W, ominous music] I’m actually pretty surprised that the New York Times is letting me say what I’ve gotta get off my chest right now. [pause] STEVE G, if you’re listening, I have an important message to deliver. How do I put this? [pause] [color, upbeat music] Thank you! Thank you for everything that you are doing for us! Your work is amazing, you get up at 0:dark:30, you blitz this puzzle every day, your hints are bangers, everybody gets to Queen now, you absolutely open the flood gates, we all are inspired to make hints of our own, we all want to lift each other up, thanks to you, my man!
2026-06-26Q: Do you have occasion to peek in now and then on hints from the Hive's hilariously brilliant Steve G?SE: 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.
2026-06-26Q: 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.
Dictionaries and Other Resources
2019-07-16I 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. … 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.
2020-10-16Mr. Ezersky is not without reference material. “I have a variety of online, up-to-date dictionaries at my disposal, including Merriam-Webster, New Oxford American and the Scrabble databases,” he said. “Another favorite resource of mine is Google’s News tab, which allows me to check if a word in question has made regular appearances in recent articles, especially in major outlets like The Times.”
2021-02-24Q: Place names and proper names are not allowed in the Bee. And that's a pretty consistent rule. But Panama is acceptable. Is that because it's also the name of a hat style? Why does Panama get an exception? SE: That is correct. And again, extremely arbitrary. And this is sort of where I even threw the dictionaries under the bus. I was so amused when I was editing the other day that I couldn't bring myself to allow Bellini (the drink) in the Bee. It's not just a person's name. And yet, everywhere I looked in dictionaries and in let's say news coverage and articles and Google searches, it, in commonplace appeared to be capitalized. And yet manhattan inexplicably is in Merriam-Webster with a lowercase M when referring to the drink. Why this is, I have absolutely no idea. And I think, you know, the Bee just exposes just some interesting quirks of the English language. It's, it's inconsistent to say the least. And I think part of that is just because the English language is inconsistent. I do not know how some of the dictionary choices and stylization are chosen. I just sort of follow 'em to the best of my ability or follow what people are saying to the best of my ability and go from there. But yeah, I totally understand. Panama, I believe was in Merriam-Webster, one of my go-tos, uh, lowercase when referring to the hat. But, uh, I guess you'll have to check me on that.
2021-02-24SE: Credit to the great New York Times games team and all the tech and design folks for having a database for me to work with of a whole bunch of different Spelling Bee pangrams.
2021-08-31BMy methodology is just extensive research. If I’m unsure, if this is something that’s a total blind spot–hello to all the gardeners out there, you all know I don’t know my plants that well—I’ll go digging around. I’ll see if it gets a lot of news coverage. I’ll see if the word is listed in the major dictionaries that I have at my disposal, which primarily are Merriam-Webster and the Mac dictionary, which I believe riffs off New Oxford American.
2021-11-10SE: …if anybody were to do the exact same research that I do -- looking in dictionaries -- 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.
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--
2022-01-13Q: 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…
2022-01-13Q: 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.
2022-04-19He occasionally spends two hours agonising over a single word, consulting several different dictionaries and New York Times articles in search of a just decision. He’s so concerned about accidentally leaving words off that he has jerry-rigged an anagram solver on his phone to catch anything the computer may have missed.
2022-04-27Sam tells me he doesn’t rely on any single dictionary. He uses a combination of sources—dictionary.com, Google, Merriam-Webster, Random House.
2022-05-22Doing 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.
2022-08-14Q: Occasionally I spell a legitimate word, but the Bee rejects it. What deems a word unacceptable?SE: Two dictionaries I use are the built-in Apple dictionary, which is based on New Oxford American, and Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary. I like using Google’s News tab, so if there is a technical word, I’ll see if it’s being used in articles without much explanation.
2022-12-01Q: Can you walk us through the process of how you create a Spelling Bee?SE: It’s too much credit to say that I just sit back in a chair and come up with these. I have tools at my disposal. I have a database of every possible puzzle that could be created.
2023-03-03"[T]he Spelling Bee uses its own dictionary, which has been painstakingly crafted over years of trial and error by our puzzle editors from many different parent dictionaries.”
2023-11-21My 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? [Summary: 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.]
2023-11-21SE: 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.
2023-12-01Ezersky doesn’t actually create the Spelling Bee puzzles from scratch. He chooses enjoyable puzzles from a massive computer database, which he likens to “dumpster diving.”
2024-07-06“The Spelling Bee puzzle is indeed crafted using a custom dictionary that has been meticulously developed by our puzzle editors. While our editor, Mr. Ezersky, occasionally consults resources such as Merriam-Webster, the New Oxford American Dictionary, Collins, and other sources for reference, the core lexicon for the Spelling Bee has been carefully curated over the years to ensure a diverse and engaging collection of words. We understand the importance of word validity for our Bee players, and we appreciate your desire for more information.”
2025-10-11SE: I have a database at my disposal. I think I can say that. Theoretically, there are so many different combinations of things that can be made with seven different letters and subsets of them. … I already have the pre-populated, if you will, word list, that is the theoretical every last answer that could possibly be made of those seven letters.
2026-04-12Q: What is the process for choosing words for Spelling Bee?SE: 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. … 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.
2026-04-12SE: I did [use] CHOCOLATE [as] 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.
2026-04-12SE: 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."
2026-06-26Q: 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.SE: 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.
2026-08-05Author: Every Times game is human-made, which means a lot of room for editor creativity and judgment. But we do have rules across all nine of our word games, and we lean on shared dictionaries to create our base word lists. We primarily use the Oxford English Dictionary and the NASPA Word List, the official dictionary for North American Scrabble Players Association tournaments. (By contrast, The Times’s newsroom uses Webster’s New World College Dictionary.) Spelling Bee uses the Oxford dictionary and is curated by Sam. For each puzzle, as he works on his list of acceptable words within a given letter set, he also reviews several other dictionaries.
2020-10-16Mr. Ezersky is not without reference material. “I have a variety of online, up-to-date dictionaries at my disposal, including Merriam-Webster, New Oxford American and the Scrabble databases,” he said. “Another favorite resource of mine is Google’s News tab, which allows me to check if a word in question has made regular appearances in recent articles, especially in major outlets like The Times.”
2021-02-24Q: Place names and proper names are not allowed in the Bee. And that's a pretty consistent rule. But Panama is acceptable. Is that because it's also the name of a hat style? Why does Panama get an exception? SE: That is correct. And again, extremely arbitrary. And this is sort of where I even threw the dictionaries under the bus. I was so amused when I was editing the other day that I couldn't bring myself to allow Bellini (the drink) in the Bee. It's not just a person's name. And yet, everywhere I looked in dictionaries and in let's say news coverage and articles and Google searches, it, in commonplace appeared to be capitalized. And yet manhattan inexplicably is in Merriam-Webster with a lowercase M when referring to the drink. Why this is, I have absolutely no idea. And I think, you know, the Bee just exposes just some interesting quirks of the English language. It's, it's inconsistent to say the least. And I think part of that is just because the English language is inconsistent. I do not know how some of the dictionary choices and stylization are chosen. I just sort of follow 'em to the best of my ability or follow what people are saying to the best of my ability and go from there. But yeah, I totally understand. Panama, I believe was in Merriam-Webster, one of my go-tos, uh, lowercase when referring to the hat. But, uh, I guess you'll have to check me on that.
2021-02-24SE: Credit to the great New York Times games team and all the tech and design folks for having a database for me to work with of a whole bunch of different Spelling Bee pangrams.
2021-08-31BMy methodology is just extensive research. If I’m unsure, if this is something that’s a total blind spot–hello to all the gardeners out there, you all know I don’t know my plants that well—I’ll go digging around. I’ll see if it gets a lot of news coverage. I’ll see if the word is listed in the major dictionaries that I have at my disposal, which primarily are Merriam-Webster and the Mac dictionary, which I believe riffs off New Oxford American.
2021-11-10SE: …if anybody were to do the exact same research that I do -- looking in dictionaries -- 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.
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--
2022-01-13Q: 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…
2022-01-13Q: 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.
2022-04-19He occasionally spends two hours agonising over a single word, consulting several different dictionaries and New York Times articles in search of a just decision. He’s so concerned about accidentally leaving words off that he has jerry-rigged an anagram solver on his phone to catch anything the computer may have missed.
2022-04-27Sam tells me he doesn’t rely on any single dictionary. He uses a combination of sources—dictionary.com, Google, Merriam-Webster, Random House.
2022-05-22Doing 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.
2022-08-14Q: Occasionally I spell a legitimate word, but the Bee rejects it. What deems a word unacceptable?SE: Two dictionaries I use are the built-in Apple dictionary, which is based on New Oxford American, and Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary. I like using Google’s News tab, so if there is a technical word, I’ll see if it’s being used in articles without much explanation.
2022-12-01Q: Can you walk us through the process of how you create a Spelling Bee?SE: It’s too much credit to say that I just sit back in a chair and come up with these. I have tools at my disposal. I have a database of every possible puzzle that could be created.
2023-03-03"[T]he Spelling Bee uses its own dictionary, which has been painstakingly crafted over years of trial and error by our puzzle editors from many different parent dictionaries.”
2023-11-21My 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? [Summary: 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.]
2023-11-21SE: 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.
2023-12-01Ezersky doesn’t actually create the Spelling Bee puzzles from scratch. He chooses enjoyable puzzles from a massive computer database, which he likens to “dumpster diving.”
2024-07-06“The Spelling Bee puzzle is indeed crafted using a custom dictionary that has been meticulously developed by our puzzle editors. While our editor, Mr. Ezersky, occasionally consults resources such as Merriam-Webster, the New Oxford American Dictionary, Collins, and other sources for reference, the core lexicon for the Spelling Bee has been carefully curated over the years to ensure a diverse and engaging collection of words. We understand the importance of word validity for our Bee players, and we appreciate your desire for more information.”
2025-10-11SE: I have a database at my disposal. I think I can say that. Theoretically, there are so many different combinations of things that can be made with seven different letters and subsets of them. … I already have the pre-populated, if you will, word list, that is the theoretical every last answer that could possibly be made of those seven letters.
2026-04-12Q: What is the process for choosing words for Spelling Bee?SE: 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. … 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.
2026-04-12SE: I did [use] CHOCOLATE [as] 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.
2026-04-12SE: 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."
2026-06-26Q: 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.SE: 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.
2026-08-05Author: Every Times game is human-made, which means a lot of room for editor creativity and judgment. But we do have rules across all nine of our word games, and we lean on shared dictionaries to create our base word lists. We primarily use the Oxford English Dictionary and the NASPA Word List, the official dictionary for North American Scrabble Players Association tournaments. (By contrast, The Times’s newsroom uses Webster’s New World College Dictionary.) Spelling Bee uses the Oxford dictionary and is curated by Sam. For each puzzle, as he works on his list of acceptable words within a given letter set, he also reviews several other dictionaries.
Editing: Pangram Selection
2020-10-16[SE] edits each [word list] individually, and the first step is to make sure that the pangram or pangrams are not head scratchers. They should be words that are instantly familiar.
2021-02-24SE: credit to the great New York Times games team and all the tech and design folks for having a database for me to work with of a whole bunch of different Spelling Bee pangrams, where it is my job to actually go through and pick out the puzzles and filter their word lists from a rather wide ranging unabridged set
2021-08-31AQ: Are there specific criteria you use for how difficult the puzzle can be? [gives as example the very difficult pangram IMBROGLIO] How do you decide what’s within bounds in terms of difficulty?SE: What I found so interesting about that [Bee with pangram imbroglio] is that that pangram was so difficult and so hard to see, to even stitch together a few letters and then sort of build on, tack on the remaining ones-- But all the other words in the wordlist, I believe, were six letters or fewer and were very, very, very straightforward. I believe that that was a lucky day for me. I don’t believe there was a single marginal line judge call here, as I was referencing earlier. But that pangram was wicked, right? Fully expected a lot of people to really struggle on that pangram or even some people-- I was willing to bet that there would be some people that would find every last word but the pangram until the next day. I usually try and avoid that, though, to be honest. And so a hard puzzle in my mind is: I try and make the puzzle hard, primarily through the actual answers in the puzzle, especially the longer ones that are worth more points, rather than the pangram itself. I thought imbroglio was fair, but really pushing it on difficulty for the pangram alone. I like keeping the pangram as accessible as possible. I actually have a particularly high bar with the pangram alone versus the rest of the wordlist, because that is the lynchpin of the puzzle, right? There are some solvers that won’t even begin solving the rest of their puzzle until they find their pangrams. So I recognize the importance of that. It’s also worth so many points. If you’re not finding the pangram, it’s going to be really hard to gain progress. It’s really based off, you know, the longer bonus words in the word list, which are worth so many points. I think a puzzle can be really difficult if a lot of those longer words are pretty tough as far as vocabulary goes, or somewhat elusive based on the, you know, the formation of prefixes, suffixes, bigrams, trigrams, et cetera.
2021-08-31BQ:Is there a specific criterion you use for how difficult the puzzle can be? As a player, I’ve seen combos of letters that allow for hundreds of options and some that allow for just a few dozen. Some of the words are really hard, especially to get the pangram, which requires all the letters. A few weeks ago, the pangram was IMBROGLIO. I was using my linguist skills, trying out the combinations of letters, probabilistically—doing bigrams and trigrams—as well as solving with an Italian speaker. And it was only because I was doing that, and I had an Italian speaker, that I got imbroglio. How do you decide what’s in bounds, in terms of difficulty?SE: That pangram was so difficult and so hard to see, to stitch together a few letters and then tack on the remaining ones. I believe all the other words in the word list were six letters or fewer and were very, very, very straightforward. That was a lucky day for me. I don’t believe there was a single marginal call, but that pangram was wicked, right? I usually try to avoid that, though. I try to make the puzzle hard primarily through the answers in the puzzle, especially the longer ones that are worth more points, rather than the pangram itself. I have a particularly high bar with the pangram, because that is the linchpin of the puzzle. There are some solvers who won’t even begin solving the rest of the puzzle until they find the pangrams. It’s also worth so many points. If you’re not finding the pangram, it’s going to be really hard to gain progress.
2022-08-14Q: Could you describe your Bee creation process?SE: I always start with the pangram (a word that contains all the letters in the puzzle) because that is the linchpin. There are a lot of esoteric words I wouldn’t want to base a puzzle around — like “ultravacua,” “clyping,” “choragi” — which is why the Spelling Bee needs a human touch. I want to offer fun pangrams…
2022-12-01Q: Can you walk us through the process of how you create a Spelling Bee?SE: I start with the pangrams, actually, because that is the linchpin of the puzzle. If the pangram is not something that my audience can even figure out in the first place or is enjoyable to figure out, then what’s the point of the whole puzzle?
2023-11-21Q: 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. 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.
2023-11-21Q: 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.
2023-12-01Ezersky doesn’t actually create the Spelling Bee puzzles from scratch. He chooses enjoyable puzzles from a massive computer database, which he likens to “dumpster diving.”
2026-04-12Q: What is the process for choosing words for Spelling Bee?SE: 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.
2026-06-26Q: 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)? :)
2026-06-26Q: 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: 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.
2026-06-26Q: 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.
2021-02-24SE: credit to the great New York Times games team and all the tech and design folks for having a database for me to work with of a whole bunch of different Spelling Bee pangrams, where it is my job to actually go through and pick out the puzzles and filter their word lists from a rather wide ranging unabridged set
2021-08-31AQ: Are there specific criteria you use for how difficult the puzzle can be? [gives as example the very difficult pangram IMBROGLIO] How do you decide what’s within bounds in terms of difficulty?SE: What I found so interesting about that [Bee with pangram imbroglio] is that that pangram was so difficult and so hard to see, to even stitch together a few letters and then sort of build on, tack on the remaining ones-- But all the other words in the wordlist, I believe, were six letters or fewer and were very, very, very straightforward. I believe that that was a lucky day for me. I don’t believe there was a single marginal line judge call here, as I was referencing earlier. But that pangram was wicked, right? Fully expected a lot of people to really struggle on that pangram or even some people-- I was willing to bet that there would be some people that would find every last word but the pangram until the next day. I usually try and avoid that, though, to be honest. And so a hard puzzle in my mind is: I try and make the puzzle hard, primarily through the actual answers in the puzzle, especially the longer ones that are worth more points, rather than the pangram itself. I thought imbroglio was fair, but really pushing it on difficulty for the pangram alone. I like keeping the pangram as accessible as possible. I actually have a particularly high bar with the pangram alone versus the rest of the wordlist, because that is the lynchpin of the puzzle, right? There are some solvers that won’t even begin solving the rest of their puzzle until they find their pangrams. So I recognize the importance of that. It’s also worth so many points. If you’re not finding the pangram, it’s going to be really hard to gain progress. It’s really based off, you know, the longer bonus words in the word list, which are worth so many points. I think a puzzle can be really difficult if a lot of those longer words are pretty tough as far as vocabulary goes, or somewhat elusive based on the, you know, the formation of prefixes, suffixes, bigrams, trigrams, et cetera.
2021-08-31BQ:Is there a specific criterion you use for how difficult the puzzle can be? As a player, I’ve seen combos of letters that allow for hundreds of options and some that allow for just a few dozen. Some of the words are really hard, especially to get the pangram, which requires all the letters. A few weeks ago, the pangram was IMBROGLIO. I was using my linguist skills, trying out the combinations of letters, probabilistically—doing bigrams and trigrams—as well as solving with an Italian speaker. And it was only because I was doing that, and I had an Italian speaker, that I got imbroglio. How do you decide what’s in bounds, in terms of difficulty?SE: That pangram was so difficult and so hard to see, to stitch together a few letters and then tack on the remaining ones. I believe all the other words in the word list were six letters or fewer and were very, very, very straightforward. That was a lucky day for me. I don’t believe there was a single marginal call, but that pangram was wicked, right? I usually try to avoid that, though. I try to make the puzzle hard primarily through the answers in the puzzle, especially the longer ones that are worth more points, rather than the pangram itself. I have a particularly high bar with the pangram, because that is the linchpin of the puzzle. There are some solvers who won’t even begin solving the rest of the puzzle until they find the pangrams. It’s also worth so many points. If you’re not finding the pangram, it’s going to be really hard to gain progress.
2022-08-14Q: Could you describe your Bee creation process?SE: I always start with the pangram (a word that contains all the letters in the puzzle) because that is the linchpin. There are a lot of esoteric words I wouldn’t want to base a puzzle around — like “ultravacua,” “clyping,” “choragi” — which is why the Spelling Bee needs a human touch. I want to offer fun pangrams…
2022-12-01Q: Can you walk us through the process of how you create a Spelling Bee?SE: I start with the pangrams, actually, because that is the linchpin of the puzzle. If the pangram is not something that my audience can even figure out in the first place or is enjoyable to figure out, then what’s the point of the whole puzzle?
2023-11-21Q: 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. 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.
2023-11-21Q: 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.
2023-12-01Ezersky doesn’t actually create the Spelling Bee puzzles from scratch. He chooses enjoyable puzzles from a massive computer database, which he likens to “dumpster diving.”
2026-04-12Q: What is the process for choosing words for Spelling Bee?SE: 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.
2026-06-26Q: 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)? :)
2026-06-26Q: 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: 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.
2026-06-26Q: 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.
Editing: Testing Panel
2022-12-01I have a testing panel who gives me excellent feedback on, what the heck is this word? There’s a lot of discussion around the word list on a given day.
2023-06-05Ezersky builds a week’s worth of puzzles in about a day, sends them to testers…
2023-11-21SE: 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 Merriam-Webster 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.
2024-05-20In 2023, … puzzle editors added testers for the Spelling Bee. The testing process is fairly simple… [an editor] sends a week’s worth of games to the testers, along with an online feedback form for each game they’re testing. The responses are due four or five days later. The games that the testers receive are scheduled to be published three or four weeks in the future. In addition to being asked to spot errors and evaluate difficulty levels, the testers answer questions about how the puzzle made them feel and whether they uncovered anything insensitive while playing, such as racial slurs or questionably timed entries.
2023-06-05Ezersky builds a week’s worth of puzzles in about a day, sends them to testers…
2023-11-21SE: 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 Merriam-Webster 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.
2024-05-20In 2023, … puzzle editors added testers for the Spelling Bee. The testing process is fairly simple… [an editor] sends a week’s worth of games to the testers, along with an online feedback form for each game they’re testing. The responses are due four or five days later. The games that the testers receive are scheduled to be published three or four weeks in the future. In addition to being asked to spot errors and evaluate difficulty levels, the testers answer questions about how the puzzle made them feel and whether they uncovered anything insensitive while playing, such as racial slurs or questionably timed entries.
Editing: Variety and Scheduling
2021-02-24Q: Do the different days of the Spelling Bee as you construct them, have different characters for you? Or are you like popping a coin into the old letter row algorithm and seeing what words are in there and double checking it?SE: There isn't really a rhyme or reason for particular Bees falling on particular days of the week. I try to keep puzzles that have similar letters separate from one another. Something will just pop up in a slot and I'll say oh, this is a fun puzzle. Let's start editing this word list and go from there. And I try and offer some nice variety over a span of time.Q: What does variety mean? Vowels versus consonants in the middle? Obviously one of the differences in the days is how many words there are in it. Some days you can finish it with 30 odd-words, and some days it seems like there's nearly a hundred. What does variety mean when you're curating these?SE: Just that. I heard complaints one time that [letter] C showed up five days in a row. So I'm like, okay, we can't have a C puzzle for the next two days, I'll spare everybody after that. One of the major things is the word count. You know, you run back to back puzzles, I believe this weekend even, with 60 total words. And so I'm like, okay, Mondays come around, we just ran two behemoths, let's do some 25-worder. A nice light way to start the week. So the word count is a lot of it, the differing letters, every so often there will be back-to-back puzzles that have four of the same seven letters. If that's the case, I've at least made sure that the word list is somehow drastically different [with] a different center letter. So it's just things like that, as you've said, I just try and keep it nice and varied in letters, word count, difficulty. You can sort of just tell based even on the word list itself, if some days are gonna be harder than others. There are definitely some marginal toughies that I'm like, I think this just gets by for the game.
2022-08-14Q: Do you ever change puzzles based on current events?SE: I held off for a long time on “infection.” It’s part of a pangram set that includes “confetti,” “confection” and “coefficient,” so it’s nice from a word-brain perspective. But I know that many enjoy this game as a diversion from the world — and the news cycle — around us. We finally used it two years into the pandemic, on April 27 of this year, with F in the center.
2022-08-14SE: I want to offer fun pangrams, some variety throughout the week, some puzzles that are easier than others. I like to save the hardest or longest puzzles for the weekend, but that doesn’t mean every Saturday or Sunday is going to be crazy hard. I like keeping you all on your toes.
2023-09-11AMr. Ezersky said the puzzles don’t generally have themes — but he will break one out for special occasions. “It’s cool to run themed puzzles, like when the pangram was VALENTINE on Feb. 14,” he said, but there are also coincidences. “The pangram was FURLONG on the day of the Kentucky Derby, and that was totally by accident,” he noted.
2023-09-11ASpelling Bee doesn’t have a difficulty curve over the week, meaning a hive published on Tuesday could be as difficult as one published on Friday. But Sam Ezersky, the puzzle’s editor, added that “if there’s a very hard puzzle, I’m more likely to offer it on the weekend, but not always.”
2023-11-21Q: 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 …
2023-11-21SE: 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.
2026-06-26Q: Do you specifically try to curate certain lengths or difficulties for certain days of the week?SE: 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.
2026-06-26Q: how far ahead of time the games are curated?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!).
2026-06-26Q: 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.
2022-08-14Q: Do you ever change puzzles based on current events?SE: I held off for a long time on “infection.” It’s part of a pangram set that includes “confetti,” “confection” and “coefficient,” so it’s nice from a word-brain perspective. But I know that many enjoy this game as a diversion from the world — and the news cycle — around us. We finally used it two years into the pandemic, on April 27 of this year, with F in the center.
2022-08-14SE: I want to offer fun pangrams, some variety throughout the week, some puzzles that are easier than others. I like to save the hardest or longest puzzles for the weekend, but that doesn’t mean every Saturday or Sunday is going to be crazy hard. I like keeping you all on your toes.
2023-09-11AMr. Ezersky said the puzzles don’t generally have themes — but he will break one out for special occasions. “It’s cool to run themed puzzles, like when the pangram was VALENTINE on Feb. 14,” he said, but there are also coincidences. “The pangram was FURLONG on the day of the Kentucky Derby, and that was totally by accident,” he noted.
2023-09-11ASpelling Bee doesn’t have a difficulty curve over the week, meaning a hive published on Tuesday could be as difficult as one published on Friday. But Sam Ezersky, the puzzle’s editor, added that “if there’s a very hard puzzle, I’m more likely to offer it on the weekend, but not always.”
2023-11-21Q: 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 …
2023-11-21SE: 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.
2026-06-26Q: Do you specifically try to curate certain lengths or difficulties for certain days of the week?SE: 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.
2026-06-26Q: how far ahead of time the games are curated?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!).
2026-06-26Q: 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.
Editing: Word Selection
2018-09-20Comment from Sam E. in Wordplay comment section RE: SPELLING BEE:I’ll have you know that today’s Spelling Bee [2018-09-20, pangram EXPLICIT] was a bear to edit. So many close calls (common-ish words with suffixes appended, I’m looking at you!) that I’m sure have elicited shrugs. Where does one draw the line? I’ve tried to be more lenient these days, as I recognize the frustration upon entering things you know that, seemingly out of subjectivity and nothing, aren’t included. At the same time, seeing words that make you go “Huh?!” in the next day’s answers is no fun either. Oh, and every individual solver has a different wheelhouse ... and my goal is to be fair to every solver. These are the things I think about :) https://www.sbsolver.com/s/135 [NOTE: 4 of the 59 words that were introduced that day were later discontinued.]
2019-07-16When 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.
2020-10-16The next step is ruling out the obvious no-nos. This is where the human touch is needed, and he says that it is one of the most misunderstood parts of his job. “We really do want solvers to find as many words in the complete list as possible,” he said. “If there’s a lot of esoterica in the list, what’s the point? Had the computer list for the puzzle (O) A D G N R U remained unedited, a part of the solution would have included words like OGDOAD, ONGAONGA, ORAD, ORGANON and OURANG.” He continued: “Would you have been able to find them all? Computers alone can only do so much number-crunching to gauge a word’s familiarity.” … “If there is anything I don’t recognize, I look it up to confirm that it isn’t just my own blind spot,” he continued. “But there are also what I call the ‘Scrabble words’ like PENK, TEIL and NIRL that I just know most players will not be familiar with and won’t try in the game. Anything that feels like a no-go — RAFFIA notwithstanding — is removed from the list.” “Keeping all this in mind, I try to make a final call that feels as fair as possible,” he added. “I used to think that the phrase ‘commonly known’ was a good gauge, but I simply can’t dictate to all solvers what is and isn’t common. But isn’t that part of the fun of Spelling Bee, too? Who doesn’t love a game that gives them the chance to feel smart — smarter than its editor, even — as well as talk all about it with others? “And when we learn more about each other, the world’s a better place,” he said.
2021-02-24Q: Why was the word coir not in the puzzle a month and a half ago? The well-known noun for the fiber from the outer husk of the coconut used for making ropes and matting. And how many annoying emails do you get a day from people wanting to know why coir is not in the puzzle? How do you make the decisions about those words?SE: Why, why coir in particular? The answer is, I don't know why coir in particular. I don't think that coir in particular should necessarily warrant exclusion per se. The way I go about filtering this word list—The biggest critics say that Spelling Bee's very arbitrary, right? I'll be the first to tell you that in some respects, it absolutely is. I think part of the beauty of Spelling Bee is that everybody is going to have their personal lexicon, right? One person's background might be another person's esoterica, whether I like it or not. I used to judge it saying, common words versus not so common words. And honestly, I'm not sure how much I like that label because again, one person, one background's commonness might be another person's “today I learned.” So I try and shape the game based on what I hear the feedback from all you solvers and from coverage in outlets like the Times, for instance: Is this word being used in daily life, can you find it? Can you infer it? And ultimately it is gonna be an arbitrary judgment call at times. Some words are gonna be ever so slightly left off in my mind. Some words are ever so slightly going to make it, and yet it's binary when you solve the game. I can totally sympathize with users that might be frustrated saying like, ah, something I know so well, why isn't in the Bee? It could have been worth eight points. It could have gotten me into Genius.
2021-08-31AQ: Are there specific criteria you use for how difficult the puzzle can be? [gives as example the very difficult pangram IMBROGLIO] How do you decide what’s within bounds in terms of difficulty?SE: What I found so interesting about that [Bee with pangram IMBROGLIO] is that that pangram was so difficult and so hard to see, to even stitch together a few letters and then sort of build on, tack on the remaining ones-- But all the other words in the wordlist, I believe, were six letters or fewer and were very, very, very straightforward. I believe that that was a lucky day for me. I don’t believe there was a single marginal line judge call here, as I was referencing earlier. But that pangram was wicked, right? Fully expected a lot of people to really struggle on that pangram or even some people-- I was willing to bet that there would be some people that would find every last word but the pangram until the next day. I usually try and avoid that, though, to be honest. And so a hard puzzle in my mind is: I try and make the puzzle hard, primarily through the actual answers in the puzzle, especially the longer ones that are worth more points, rather than the pangram itself. I thought imbroglio was fair, but really pushing it on difficulty for the pangram alone. I like keeping the pangram as accessible as possible. I actually have a particularly high bar with the pangram alone versus the rest of the wordlist, because that is the lynchpin of the puzzle, right? There are some solvers that won’t even begin solving the rest of their puzzle until they find their pangrams. So I recognize the importance of that. It’s also worth so many points. If you’re not finding the pangram, it’s going to be really hard to gain progress. It’s really based off, you know, the longer bonus words in the word list, which are worth so many points. I think a puzzle can be really difficult if a lot of those longer words are pretty tough as far as vocabulary goes, or somewhat elusive based on the, you know, the formation of prefixes, suffixes, bigrams, trigrams, et cetera.
2021-08-31AQ: What is the process of deciding which words are in and which words are out for each day’s hive?SE: Yeah, so the million dollar question. Right. So a lot of the calls are pretty easy, honestly, for the most part. I’d say one thing I wish people knew more about my job is that even though the word list is a binary “Yes, it’s in the word list” or “No, it’s not in the word list,” there are tons and tons and tons of close calls. And anybody editing this game, you know, can have their own personal like-- this barely gets by or this barely misses the cut. And it’s really just-- my actual methodology is just through extensive research. If I’m unsure if this is something that’s a total blind spot. Hello to all the gardeners out there. You all know I don’t know my plants that well, but so I’ll go digging around, literally digging around to research my plants, basically. And I’ll do this from a very high level. I’ll see if this gets a lot of news coverage. I’ll see if. Well, first of all, if this word is literally listed in every major dictionary that I use at my disposal, which primarily are Merriam Webster and the Mac Dictionary, which I believe riffs off the New Oxford American, ultimately, it just comes down to my guiding question is what feels fair to our wide-ranging audience? I don’t want to snub those where this is really it’s a word that is so common to their background or life style or culture. But I also don’t want to include something that will truly mystify the vast majority of our solving audience and not just those Queen Bee folks that know everything. So ultimately, it’s an arbitrary call. And I just continue to shape this Bee based off what people say.
2021-08-31ASE: My actual methodology is just through extensive research. If I’m unsure if this is something that’s a total blind spot. Hello to all the gardeners out there. You all know I don’t know my plants that well, but so I’ll go digging around, literally digging around to research my plants, basically. And I’ll do this from a very high level. I’ll see if this gets a lot of news coverage. I’ll see if. Well, first of all, if this word is literally listed in every major dictionary that I use at my disposal, which primarily are Merriam Webster and the Mac Dictionary, which I believe riffs off the New Oxford American…
2021-08-31BQ: What is the process of deciding which words are in and which words are out for each day’s hive?SE: That’s the million-dollar question! A lot of the calls are pretty easy. Even though the word list is a binary “yes, it’s in the word list” or “no, it’s not in the word list,” there are tons and tons of close calls. [research] Ultimately, my guiding question is: What feels fair to our wide-ranging audience? I don’t want to snub those where it’s a word that is so common to their background or lifestyle or culture, but I also don’t want to include something that will truly mystify the vast majority of our solving audience—and not just those queen bee folks who know everything.
2021-11-10Q: 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.
2022-01-13Q: 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.
2022-01-13Q: 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.
2022-04-27Q: I ask Sam how he chooses which words are allowed and which don’t count.SE: Like so much in the puzzle world, those decisions require a human touch, he says. It’s not something an algorithm can do. As Sam explained in The New York Times, “one person’s expansive vocabulary or specialized knowledge is another’s obscurity or esoterica.” But the line between expansiveness and esoterica is debatable. [Raffiagate] The Spelling Bee gets critiqued from both sides of the political spectrum. Sam gets flak for being too woke—he doesn’t include any words that can be used as ethnic slurs, even if that word has an alternate meaning. And he gets flak for not being woke enough. Why “wingman” but not “wingwoman?”
2022-05-22Part 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. 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.
2022-08-14Q: Occasionally I spell a legitimate word, but the Bee rejects it. What deems a word unacceptable?SE: Ultimately, the decisions can seem arbitrary because every solver has a different background and vocabulary. If an answer list had every possible word, it would be harder to make progress toward Genius and beyond. I can understand the frustration, but my mission is not to be a dictionary. I want to do my best to reflect the Bee’s broad audience and the language we speak.
2022-12-01Q: Can you walk us through the process of how you create a Spelling Bee?SE: My goal, which is why a game like this needs an editor in general rather than a computer, is to actually come up with the good, enjoyable puzzles. I start with the pangrams, actually, because that is the linchpin of the puzzle. If the pangram is not something that my audience can even figure out in the first place or is enjoyable to figure out, then what’s the point of the whole puzzle? You don’t want there to be too many words. You don’t want there to be too few words, and you don’t want the longer words to be so hard that it’s going to be impossible for anyone to get the “genius” because the longer words teeter on technical. My goal is, you don’t just want every last word in the dictionary to appear in this puzzle, or nobody’s ever going to get to “genius,” right? One person’s wheelhouse is another person’s esoterica. I know that at this point, everybody has a word or 10 words that they’ve like tried before and they’re like, why the heck isn’t that on the list? And it’s all subjective at the end of the day, right?
2023-11-21Q: 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?Q: 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… 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.
2023-12-19“So much of the discourse around Spelling Bee is, ‘Why is this word not in your word list?’ Shaking your fist at it. I’m like, is this by design?” says Michael Sharp, an English professor who has spent the past 17 years blogging about the daily Times crossword under the pseudonym Rex Parker. (Ezersky would say no, that he prunes word lists “however arbitrarily for what I think is fair for our audience.”)
2025-10-11Q: How do you create the Spelling Bee for the day?SE: For those tuning in for the first time, the way Spelling Bee works is there's seven different letters arranged in a hexagonal shape. One of the letters is in the center. You make words by anagramming. The only twist or there are two twists is you must use the center letter, and you can use all of the letters as often as possible. With just the letters A, C, and I, you can make acai, and you can also make acacia. So I'm not kicking back in a chair and going, You know what words you can make with seven different letters? Let's try this and let's just brainstorm all the other words you can make with seven letters. I have a database at my disposal. I think I can say that. Theoretically, there are so many different combinations of things that can be made with seven different letters and subsets of them. My role as editor, which is why I draw the line saying I edit Spelling Bee versus where I create it from scratch, is my role is to pick out the good puzzles. You want to be excited by this puzzle. And then I will also, I already have the pre-populated, if you will, word list, that is the theoretical every last answer that could possibly be made of those seven letters. It's my job to go through the controversial job, of course, of deciding which words should be accepted in that puzzle for the day. It is data-driven, but it is human-curated, is probably the best way I could [describe] Spelling Bee.
2026-04-12Q: What is the process for choosing words for Spelling Bee?SE: 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 meHOST: Does dawg appear on the list? D-A-W-G?SE: Great question! I don't-- Somebody will know. Probably not.
2026-06-26SE: 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!
2026-08-05SE: “If you simply include every theoretical word imaginable in a given puzzle, it will be that much more difficult to get to Amazing, Genius and beyond, and not in a satisfying way,” said Sam Ezersky, the puzzle’s editor.SE edits for familiarity and avoids a word if its primary definition is considered a slur or a vulgarity, or if it elicits a viscerally negative reaction.
2019-07-16When 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.
2020-10-16The next step is ruling out the obvious no-nos. This is where the human touch is needed, and he says that it is one of the most misunderstood parts of his job. “We really do want solvers to find as many words in the complete list as possible,” he said. “If there’s a lot of esoterica in the list, what’s the point? Had the computer list for the puzzle (O) A D G N R U remained unedited, a part of the solution would have included words like OGDOAD, ONGAONGA, ORAD, ORGANON and OURANG.” He continued: “Would you have been able to find them all? Computers alone can only do so much number-crunching to gauge a word’s familiarity.” … “If there is anything I don’t recognize, I look it up to confirm that it isn’t just my own blind spot,” he continued. “But there are also what I call the ‘Scrabble words’ like PENK, TEIL and NIRL that I just know most players will not be familiar with and won’t try in the game. Anything that feels like a no-go — RAFFIA notwithstanding — is removed from the list.” “Keeping all this in mind, I try to make a final call that feels as fair as possible,” he added. “I used to think that the phrase ‘commonly known’ was a good gauge, but I simply can’t dictate to all solvers what is and isn’t common. But isn’t that part of the fun of Spelling Bee, too? Who doesn’t love a game that gives them the chance to feel smart — smarter than its editor, even — as well as talk all about it with others? “And when we learn more about each other, the world’s a better place,” he said.
2021-02-24Q: Why was the word coir not in the puzzle a month and a half ago? The well-known noun for the fiber from the outer husk of the coconut used for making ropes and matting. And how many annoying emails do you get a day from people wanting to know why coir is not in the puzzle? How do you make the decisions about those words?SE: Why, why coir in particular? The answer is, I don't know why coir in particular. I don't think that coir in particular should necessarily warrant exclusion per se. The way I go about filtering this word list—The biggest critics say that Spelling Bee's very arbitrary, right? I'll be the first to tell you that in some respects, it absolutely is. I think part of the beauty of Spelling Bee is that everybody is going to have their personal lexicon, right? One person's background might be another person's esoterica, whether I like it or not. I used to judge it saying, common words versus not so common words. And honestly, I'm not sure how much I like that label because again, one person, one background's commonness might be another person's “today I learned.” So I try and shape the game based on what I hear the feedback from all you solvers and from coverage in outlets like the Times, for instance: Is this word being used in daily life, can you find it? Can you infer it? And ultimately it is gonna be an arbitrary judgment call at times. Some words are gonna be ever so slightly left off in my mind. Some words are ever so slightly going to make it, and yet it's binary when you solve the game. I can totally sympathize with users that might be frustrated saying like, ah, something I know so well, why isn't in the Bee? It could have been worth eight points. It could have gotten me into Genius.
2021-08-31AQ: Are there specific criteria you use for how difficult the puzzle can be? [gives as example the very difficult pangram IMBROGLIO] How do you decide what’s within bounds in terms of difficulty?SE: What I found so interesting about that [Bee with pangram IMBROGLIO] is that that pangram was so difficult and so hard to see, to even stitch together a few letters and then sort of build on, tack on the remaining ones-- But all the other words in the wordlist, I believe, were six letters or fewer and were very, very, very straightforward. I believe that that was a lucky day for me. I don’t believe there was a single marginal line judge call here, as I was referencing earlier. But that pangram was wicked, right? Fully expected a lot of people to really struggle on that pangram or even some people-- I was willing to bet that there would be some people that would find every last word but the pangram until the next day. I usually try and avoid that, though, to be honest. And so a hard puzzle in my mind is: I try and make the puzzle hard, primarily through the actual answers in the puzzle, especially the longer ones that are worth more points, rather than the pangram itself. I thought imbroglio was fair, but really pushing it on difficulty for the pangram alone. I like keeping the pangram as accessible as possible. I actually have a particularly high bar with the pangram alone versus the rest of the wordlist, because that is the lynchpin of the puzzle, right? There are some solvers that won’t even begin solving the rest of their puzzle until they find their pangrams. So I recognize the importance of that. It’s also worth so many points. If you’re not finding the pangram, it’s going to be really hard to gain progress. It’s really based off, you know, the longer bonus words in the word list, which are worth so many points. I think a puzzle can be really difficult if a lot of those longer words are pretty tough as far as vocabulary goes, or somewhat elusive based on the, you know, the formation of prefixes, suffixes, bigrams, trigrams, et cetera.
2021-08-31AQ: What is the process of deciding which words are in and which words are out for each day’s hive?SE: Yeah, so the million dollar question. Right. So a lot of the calls are pretty easy, honestly, for the most part. I’d say one thing I wish people knew more about my job is that even though the word list is a binary “Yes, it’s in the word list” or “No, it’s not in the word list,” there are tons and tons and tons of close calls. And anybody editing this game, you know, can have their own personal like-- this barely gets by or this barely misses the cut. And it’s really just-- my actual methodology is just through extensive research. If I’m unsure if this is something that’s a total blind spot. Hello to all the gardeners out there. You all know I don’t know my plants that well, but so I’ll go digging around, literally digging around to research my plants, basically. And I’ll do this from a very high level. I’ll see if this gets a lot of news coverage. I’ll see if. Well, first of all, if this word is literally listed in every major dictionary that I use at my disposal, which primarily are Merriam Webster and the Mac Dictionary, which I believe riffs off the New Oxford American, ultimately, it just comes down to my guiding question is what feels fair to our wide-ranging audience? I don’t want to snub those where this is really it’s a word that is so common to their background or life style or culture. But I also don’t want to include something that will truly mystify the vast majority of our solving audience and not just those Queen Bee folks that know everything. So ultimately, it’s an arbitrary call. And I just continue to shape this Bee based off what people say.
2021-08-31ASE: My actual methodology is just through extensive research. If I’m unsure if this is something that’s a total blind spot. Hello to all the gardeners out there. You all know I don’t know my plants that well, but so I’ll go digging around, literally digging around to research my plants, basically. And I’ll do this from a very high level. I’ll see if this gets a lot of news coverage. I’ll see if. Well, first of all, if this word is literally listed in every major dictionary that I use at my disposal, which primarily are Merriam Webster and the Mac Dictionary, which I believe riffs off the New Oxford American…
2021-08-31BQ: What is the process of deciding which words are in and which words are out for each day’s hive?SE: That’s the million-dollar question! A lot of the calls are pretty easy. Even though the word list is a binary “yes, it’s in the word list” or “no, it’s not in the word list,” there are tons and tons of close calls. [research] Ultimately, my guiding question is: What feels fair to our wide-ranging audience? I don’t want to snub those where it’s a word that is so common to their background or lifestyle or culture, but I also don’t want to include something that will truly mystify the vast majority of our solving audience—and not just those queen bee folks who know everything.
2021-11-10Q: 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.
2022-01-13Q: 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.
2022-01-13Q: 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.
2022-04-27Q: I ask Sam how he chooses which words are allowed and which don’t count.SE: Like so much in the puzzle world, those decisions require a human touch, he says. It’s not something an algorithm can do. As Sam explained in The New York Times, “one person’s expansive vocabulary or specialized knowledge is another’s obscurity or esoterica.” But the line between expansiveness and esoterica is debatable. [Raffiagate] The Spelling Bee gets critiqued from both sides of the political spectrum. Sam gets flak for being too woke—he doesn’t include any words that can be used as ethnic slurs, even if that word has an alternate meaning. And he gets flak for not being woke enough. Why “wingman” but not “wingwoman?”
2022-05-22Part 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. 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.
2022-08-14Q: Occasionally I spell a legitimate word, but the Bee rejects it. What deems a word unacceptable?SE: Ultimately, the decisions can seem arbitrary because every solver has a different background and vocabulary. If an answer list had every possible word, it would be harder to make progress toward Genius and beyond. I can understand the frustration, but my mission is not to be a dictionary. I want to do my best to reflect the Bee’s broad audience and the language we speak.
2022-12-01Q: Can you walk us through the process of how you create a Spelling Bee?SE: My goal, which is why a game like this needs an editor in general rather than a computer, is to actually come up with the good, enjoyable puzzles. I start with the pangrams, actually, because that is the linchpin of the puzzle. If the pangram is not something that my audience can even figure out in the first place or is enjoyable to figure out, then what’s the point of the whole puzzle? You don’t want there to be too many words. You don’t want there to be too few words, and you don’t want the longer words to be so hard that it’s going to be impossible for anyone to get the “genius” because the longer words teeter on technical. My goal is, you don’t just want every last word in the dictionary to appear in this puzzle, or nobody’s ever going to get to “genius,” right? One person’s wheelhouse is another person’s esoterica. I know that at this point, everybody has a word or 10 words that they’ve like tried before and they’re like, why the heck isn’t that on the list? And it’s all subjective at the end of the day, right?
2023-11-21Q: 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?Q: 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… 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.
2023-12-19“So much of the discourse around Spelling Bee is, ‘Why is this word not in your word list?’ Shaking your fist at it. I’m like, is this by design?” says Michael Sharp, an English professor who has spent the past 17 years blogging about the daily Times crossword under the pseudonym Rex Parker. (Ezersky would say no, that he prunes word lists “however arbitrarily for what I think is fair for our audience.”)
2025-10-11Q: How do you create the Spelling Bee for the day?SE: For those tuning in for the first time, the way Spelling Bee works is there's seven different letters arranged in a hexagonal shape. One of the letters is in the center. You make words by anagramming. The only twist or there are two twists is you must use the center letter, and you can use all of the letters as often as possible. With just the letters A, C, and I, you can make acai, and you can also make acacia. So I'm not kicking back in a chair and going, You know what words you can make with seven different letters? Let's try this and let's just brainstorm all the other words you can make with seven letters. I have a database at my disposal. I think I can say that. Theoretically, there are so many different combinations of things that can be made with seven different letters and subsets of them. My role as editor, which is why I draw the line saying I edit Spelling Bee versus where I create it from scratch, is my role is to pick out the good puzzles. You want to be excited by this puzzle. And then I will also, I already have the pre-populated, if you will, word list, that is the theoretical every last answer that could possibly be made of those seven letters. It's my job to go through the controversial job, of course, of deciding which words should be accepted in that puzzle for the day. It is data-driven, but it is human-curated, is probably the best way I could [describe] Spelling Bee.
2026-04-12Q: What is the process for choosing words for Spelling Bee?SE: 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 meHOST: Does dawg appear on the list? D-A-W-G?SE: Great question! I don't-- Somebody will know. Probably not.
2026-06-26SE: 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!
2026-08-05SE: “If you simply include every theoretical word imaginable in a given puzzle, it will be that much more difficult to get to Amazing, Genius and beyond, and not in a satisfying way,” said Sam Ezersky, the puzzle’s editor.SE edits for familiarity and avoids a word if its primary definition is considered a slur or a vulgarity, or if it elicits a viscerally negative reaction.
Editorial Role
2019-07-16When I edit the word list for a given puzzle, my goal is to keep solvers from all walks of life in mind. … 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 😊I
2021-08-31AQ: They call it the hive mind, but it’s really just kind of grown into epic proportions, like you say, since the pandemic. And now the Times has launched a daily discussion forum just for Spelling Bee fans. And they have their own lingo when they’re talking about it. So what is it like being responsible for something that attracts such a diehard community?SE: It’s so rewarding. It is exhilarating to be able to hear from so many people, people with all sorts of walks of life, people with all sorts of different affinities for word games or puzzles in general. There might be someone I’ve heard from that I hear from every day who’s clearly, you know, some just expert wordsmith, pointing out this of this crazy Scrabble word that I probably couldn’t allow to these, you know, the newer sorts that are just like, oh, hey, I didn’t know that Queen Bee existed. What’s this all about? Why don’t you all post the Queen Bee score? Now, I’m never going to put this thing down. It’s definitely feels like there’s a lot of weight on my shoulders. There’s a ton of responsibility. I’m one person shaping a one size fits all wordlist for everybody, which in itself is going to be arbitrary, as the biggest critics say, of course it’s arbitrary, but I really have such a blast doing this. I take all the feedback I get to heart because I feel like that is part of my role, except for the negative. I’m on the lookout for this. I could never have expected this. I really did not know that this was going to blossom into such a subculture with such an ardent following. And I, you know, just get to participate in this now as well.
2021-11-10Q: 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.
2022-01-13Q: Bee took on another life during the pandemic. When did you realize that the Bee 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.
2022-04-19SE took on the role [of Bee editor] in 2018 as a side-gig to editing the crossword in the newspaper’s print edition, and he used the same principle the crossword page did: is the word common enough that the average solver might be expected to guess it? He didn’t anticipate it taking up much time. “I thought: how hard can it be?” he tells me. “I just get to say yes to some words and no to others.’’ He quickly discovered he had walked into a trap that has ensnared lexicographers since Samuel Johnson’s “Dictionary of the English Language” in 1755.
2023-06-05Ezersky builds a week’s worth of puzzles in about a day, sends them to testers, and spends much of his time deciding which words to allow as solutions. Words under four letters aren’t allowed, nor proper nouns or words Ezersky deems too esoteric. That last part is where the controversy lies. “One person’s personal wheelhouse is another person’s esoterica,” Ezersky says.
2023-11-21SE [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.”
2024-09-03SE: You’re probably wondering why does a game like Spelling Bee even need an editor to begin with? Content can be turned out algorithmically, right? … I edit the Spelling Bee on a daily basis; my fingerprints are all over these puzzles. The point of a human editor for any game is to be able to just tailor this game to its audience better, it’s being able to make this game live and breathe. Algorithmic stuff can only capture so much of the fun quotient. As a human editor I get to do my best to put myself in your human shoes. What could be fun in a puzzle? It’s not even just about my own opinion, it’s like, what are the sorts of things can I learn from you all as I edit the Spelling Bee on a day to day basis? My role is for Spelling Bee, in the almost six years I’ve edited this game, is to be able to have this game really live and breathe and evolve with its audience. If I’m here, you can continue to just feel that this game is not just something that’s being churned out by a bot.
2025-10-11Q: How do you create the Spelling Bee for the day?SE: So I'm not kicking back in a chair and going, You know what words you can make with seven different letters? Let's try this and let's just brainstorm all the other words you can make with seven letters. I have a database at my disposal. I think I can say that. Theoretically, there are so many different combinations of things that can be made with seven different letters and subsets of them. My role as editor, which is why I draw the line saying I edit Spelling Bee versus where I create it from scratch, is my role is to pick out the good puzzles. You want to be excited by this puzzle. And then I will also, I already have the pre-populated, if you will, word list, that is the theoretical every last answer that could possibly be made of those seven letters. It's my job to go through the controversial job, of course, of deciding which words should be accepted in that puzzle for the day. It is data-driven, but it is human-curated, is probably the best way I could [describe] Spelling Bee.
2021-08-31AQ: They call it the hive mind, but it’s really just kind of grown into epic proportions, like you say, since the pandemic. And now the Times has launched a daily discussion forum just for Spelling Bee fans. And they have their own lingo when they’re talking about it. So what is it like being responsible for something that attracts such a diehard community?SE: It’s so rewarding. It is exhilarating to be able to hear from so many people, people with all sorts of walks of life, people with all sorts of different affinities for word games or puzzles in general. There might be someone I’ve heard from that I hear from every day who’s clearly, you know, some just expert wordsmith, pointing out this of this crazy Scrabble word that I probably couldn’t allow to these, you know, the newer sorts that are just like, oh, hey, I didn’t know that Queen Bee existed. What’s this all about? Why don’t you all post the Queen Bee score? Now, I’m never going to put this thing down. It’s definitely feels like there’s a lot of weight on my shoulders. There’s a ton of responsibility. I’m one person shaping a one size fits all wordlist for everybody, which in itself is going to be arbitrary, as the biggest critics say, of course it’s arbitrary, but I really have such a blast doing this. I take all the feedback I get to heart because I feel like that is part of my role, except for the negative. I’m on the lookout for this. I could never have expected this. I really did not know that this was going to blossom into such a subculture with such an ardent following. And I, you know, just get to participate in this now as well.
2021-11-10Q: 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.
2022-01-13Q: Bee took on another life during the pandemic. When did you realize that the Bee 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.
2022-04-19SE took on the role [of Bee editor] in 2018 as a side-gig to editing the crossword in the newspaper’s print edition, and he used the same principle the crossword page did: is the word common enough that the average solver might be expected to guess it? He didn’t anticipate it taking up much time. “I thought: how hard can it be?” he tells me. “I just get to say yes to some words and no to others.’’ He quickly discovered he had walked into a trap that has ensnared lexicographers since Samuel Johnson’s “Dictionary of the English Language” in 1755.
2023-06-05Ezersky builds a week’s worth of puzzles in about a day, sends them to testers, and spends much of his time deciding which words to allow as solutions. Words under four letters aren’t allowed, nor proper nouns or words Ezersky deems too esoteric. That last part is where the controversy lies. “One person’s personal wheelhouse is another person’s esoterica,” Ezersky says.
2023-11-21SE [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.”
2024-09-03SE: You’re probably wondering why does a game like Spelling Bee even need an editor to begin with? Content can be turned out algorithmically, right? … I edit the Spelling Bee on a daily basis; my fingerprints are all over these puzzles. The point of a human editor for any game is to be able to just tailor this game to its audience better, it’s being able to make this game live and breathe. Algorithmic stuff can only capture so much of the fun quotient. As a human editor I get to do my best to put myself in your human shoes. What could be fun in a puzzle? It’s not even just about my own opinion, it’s like, what are the sorts of things can I learn from you all as I edit the Spelling Bee on a day to day basis? My role is for Spelling Bee, in the almost six years I’ve edited this game, is to be able to have this game really live and breathe and evolve with its audience. If I’m here, you can continue to just feel that this game is not just something that’s being churned out by a bot.
2025-10-11Q: How do you create the Spelling Bee for the day?SE: So I'm not kicking back in a chair and going, You know what words you can make with seven different letters? Let's try this and let's just brainstorm all the other words you can make with seven letters. I have a database at my disposal. I think I can say that. Theoretically, there are so many different combinations of things that can be made with seven different letters and subsets of them. My role as editor, which is why I draw the line saying I edit Spelling Bee versus where I create it from scratch, is my role is to pick out the good puzzles. You want to be excited by this puzzle. And then I will also, I already have the pre-populated, if you will, word list, that is the theoretical every last answer that could possibly be made of those seven letters. It's my job to go through the controversial job, of course, of deciding which words should be accepted in that puzzle for the day. It is data-driven, but it is human-curated, is probably the best way I could [describe] Spelling Bee.
Lexicon: Capitals, Hyphens, etc.
2020-10-16“There is a basic framework to the game, and that dictates how I edit,” Mr. Ezersky said. “I start with the following:• No proper nouns or capitalized terms, unless they have a reason for the lowercase context.• No vulgarity or vulgar slang.• No clear variants or British variants on American English words.• Nothing with hyphens or contractions, or anything that’s more regularly written as more than one word.• Nothing so informal that players might say, ‘That’s not really a word … ’
2021-02-24Q: Place names and proper names are not allowed in the Bee. And that's a pretty consistent rule. But Panama is acceptable. Is that because it's also the name of a hat style? Why does Panama get an exception? SE: That is correct. And again, extremely arbitrary. And this is sort of where I even threw the dictionaries under the bus. I was so amused when I was editing the other day that I couldn't bring myself to allow Bellini (the drink) in the Bee. It's not just a person's name. And yet, everywhere I looked in dictionaries and in let's say news coverage and articles and Google searches, it, in commonplace appeared to be capitalized. And yet manhattan inexplicably is in Merriam-Webster with a lowercase M when referring to the drink. Why this is, I have absolutely no idea. And I think, you know, the Bee just exposes just some interesting quirks of the English language. It's, it's inconsistent to say the least. And I think part of that is just because the English language is inconsistent. I do not know how some of the dictionary choices and stylization are chosen. I just sort of follow 'em to the best of my ability or follow what people are saying to the best of my ability and go from there. But yeah, I totally understand. Panama, I believe was in Merriam-Webster, one of my go-tos, uh, lowercase when referring to the hat. But, uh, I guess you'll have to check me on that.
2022-01-13SE: 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.
2022-05-22Also -- 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?
2021-02-24Q: Place names and proper names are not allowed in the Bee. And that's a pretty consistent rule. But Panama is acceptable. Is that because it's also the name of a hat style? Why does Panama get an exception? SE: That is correct. And again, extremely arbitrary. And this is sort of where I even threw the dictionaries under the bus. I was so amused when I was editing the other day that I couldn't bring myself to allow Bellini (the drink) in the Bee. It's not just a person's name. And yet, everywhere I looked in dictionaries and in let's say news coverage and articles and Google searches, it, in commonplace appeared to be capitalized. And yet manhattan inexplicably is in Merriam-Webster with a lowercase M when referring to the drink. Why this is, I have absolutely no idea. And I think, you know, the Bee just exposes just some interesting quirks of the English language. It's, it's inconsistent to say the least. And I think part of that is just because the English language is inconsistent. I do not know how some of the dictionary choices and stylization are chosen. I just sort of follow 'em to the best of my ability or follow what people are saying to the best of my ability and go from there. But yeah, I totally understand. Panama, I believe was in Merriam-Webster, one of my go-tos, uh, lowercase when referring to the hat. But, uh, I guess you'll have to check me on that.
2022-01-13SE: 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.
2022-05-22Also -- 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?
Lexicon: Crosswordese
2020-10-16Spelling Bee was created as an alternative game for those who might not be interested in the New York Times Crossword. As such, it is edited by the game’s editor Sam Ezersky with an eye for words that can be considered familiar to a majority of solvers, as opposed to some of the tougher vocabulary that solvers see in crossword puzzles. “It has to be frustrating to discover something you know is a word — one you might even use regularly — only to see it nullified by the game,” Mr. Ezersky said. “It’s all a balance, though. There’s only one master list for everyone. And one person’s expansive vocabulary or specialized knowledge is another’s obscurity or esoterica. So the playing field must be kept level somehow, and my guiding question these days is, ‘What feels fair for our audience?’”
2022-01-13Q: 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].
2022-12-01Q: What are the most common “why wasn’t this word accepted?” complaints? What are the most common “why was this word accepted?” complaints?SE: The most common complaints tend to be around words that people recognize from doing crosswords over and over again, that I don’t like to add in the Spelling Bee because I believe it’s a different experience.
2026-06-26Q: 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!
2022-01-13Q: 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].
2022-12-01Q: What are the most common “why wasn’t this word accepted?” complaints? What are the most common “why was this word accepted?” complaints?SE: The most common complaints tend to be around words that people recognize from doing crosswords over and over again, that I don’t like to add in the Spelling Bee because I believe it’s a different experience.
2026-06-26Q: 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!
Lexicon: Foreign Words, British, etc.
2020-10-16“There is a basic framework to the game, and that dictates how I edit,” Mr. Ezersky said. “I start with the following:• No proper nouns or capitalized terms, unless they have a reason for the lowercase context.• No vulgarity or vulgar slang.• No clear variants or British variants on American English words.• Nothing with hyphens or contractions, or anything that’s more regularly written as more than one word.• Nothing so informal that players might say, ‘That’s not really a word … ’
2021-11-10There'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 always going to keep my eyes and ears out, because there's no be-all, end-all here.
2022-04-19Loan words like hammam are particularly stressful because the linguistic communities that might consider them common are often more marginalised than, say, the sailing enthusiasts. He doesn’t feel as qualified to make judgment calls on these words and tends to lean on data such as the frequency with which they appear in various dictionaries. He won’t take any word that might double as a slur against a particular community.
2023-11-21SE: 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 Merriam-Webster 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.
2024-04-14Sam: Here's why some loanwords from foreign languages count in Spelling Bee.Q: Can you address why sometimes words in other languages count and sometimes they don’t? What’s your barometer there?SE: If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my 5+ years of doing this, it’s that the English language is really quirky, and for some reason, there are words that are considered loan words from other languages and cultures that are listed in English-language dictionaries, and some words that aren’t, and it’s confusing because sometimes there are words that you know and I know, but they’re not listed in these English-language dictionaries, and I’d rather make judgement calls based off, you know, a dictionary backing than Sam’s own personal vibe check. Of course, deepest sympathies because it sometimes seems arbitrary at the end of the day, but the line has to be drawn somewhere, even if it’s on an albeit weird parameter.
2021-11-10There'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 always going to keep my eyes and ears out, because there's no be-all, end-all here.
2022-04-19Loan words like hammam are particularly stressful because the linguistic communities that might consider them common are often more marginalised than, say, the sailing enthusiasts. He doesn’t feel as qualified to make judgment calls on these words and tends to lean on data such as the frequency with which they appear in various dictionaries. He won’t take any word that might double as a slur against a particular community.
2023-11-21SE: 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 Merriam-Webster 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.
2024-04-14Sam: Here's why some loanwords from foreign languages count in Spelling Bee.Q: Can you address why sometimes words in other languages count and sometimes they don’t? What’s your barometer there?SE: If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my 5+ years of doing this, it’s that the English language is really quirky, and for some reason, there are words that are considered loan words from other languages and cultures that are listed in English-language dictionaries, and some words that aren’t, and it’s confusing because sometimes there are words that you know and I know, but they’re not listed in these English-language dictionaries, and I’d rather make judgement calls based off, you know, a dictionary backing than Sam’s own personal vibe check. Of course, deepest sympathies because it sometimes seems arbitrary at the end of the day, but the line has to be drawn somewhere, even if it’s on an albeit weird parameter.
Lexicon: General Information
2019-07-16When 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.
2020-10-16“There is a basic framework to the game, and that dictates how I edit,” Mr. Ezersky said. “I start with the following:• No proper nouns or capitalized terms, unless they have a reason for the lowercase context.• No vulgarity or vulgar slang.• No clear variants or British variants on American English words.• Nothing with hyphens or contractions, or anything that’s more regularly written as more than one word.• Nothing so informal that players might say, ‘That’s not really a word … ’
2021-11-10Q: 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.
2021-12-09Even though the letter S is never included — the editor Sam Ezersky said that using an S would make the puzzle way too easy — plurals do exist in Spelling Bee.
2022-04-27Q: I tell Sam that one reason I like the Spelling Bee is that it makes me realize just how arbitrary the English language is.SE: “Oh, my goodness! I think about that all the time,” says Sam. … “Today, there was the word narrator in the Spelling Bee,” Sam points out. “Why does that end in or instead of er like other nouns from verbs? And why is it rater instead of rator?” Then there is the classic genre of negative words that have no positive equivalent: You can say “inept” but not “ept.” Sam says, “Just yesterday, I was thinking, why is ‘legalized’ a common word, but not ‘illegalized?’”
2025-10-11Q: How do you decide what words are acceptable?SE: You've got three hours for this, right? The vast majority, in spite of how much this is talked about, the vast majority is very easy. Ball. Yes. Call. Fall. These are all noncontroversial words. … Then there are words I'm not at the risk of one, just totally airing or two, at the risk of being squarely in somebody's wheelhouse. There are words that we'll call them Scrabble Words. They are things that are not even listed in some dictionaries. They're only found in unabridged things. It is this genus of shrub that only lives in this one country in the world. So there needs to be a line drawn somewhere because you want to be able to find as many words as possible. You don't want the reason you didn't get to genius because there are all these Scrabble words. So that's the philosophy around pruning the word list, as I like to say to begin … Then you get to the name of a bird. … There are some birds that are in the Spelling Bee, and there are some birds that aren't. And it seems really, really arbitrary. I'm not laughing at you going, Ha-ha, you love niche birds. No, birds should be in the Spelling Bee. And to be clear, my stance on this has changed over time, allowing more and more birds in the Spelling Bee because everybody has their own bits of, we'll call it a specialized thing. But hey, to you bird lovers out there, it's probably not seemingly specialized to you, right?Q: One [bird that doesn’t make the cut] is anhinga, which drives me crazy because you go to Florida, you see anhingas everywhere. Q: Sam, your rebuttal?SE: No. My rebuttal actually is literally is a non-rebuttal. I guess what I myself have learned my own journey as editor is it's fascinating just how arbitrary language is, words that are accepted in some dictionaries but not accepted in other dictionaries. So Spelling Bee is just yet another lexicon that just has some things and doesn't have others. Then there's that extra layer of making it fun and accessible to such a widespread group of solvers out there. It's a journey, and it's ever evolving.
2026-04-12SE: [Spelling Bee is] 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.Q: 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.
2026-04-12SE: 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."
2026-06-26Q: 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.SE: 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.
2020-10-16“There is a basic framework to the game, and that dictates how I edit,” Mr. Ezersky said. “I start with the following:• No proper nouns or capitalized terms, unless they have a reason for the lowercase context.• No vulgarity or vulgar slang.• No clear variants or British variants on American English words.• Nothing with hyphens or contractions, or anything that’s more regularly written as more than one word.• Nothing so informal that players might say, ‘That’s not really a word … ’
2021-11-10Q: 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.
2021-12-09Even though the letter S is never included — the editor Sam Ezersky said that using an S would make the puzzle way too easy — plurals do exist in Spelling Bee.
2022-04-27Q: I tell Sam that one reason I like the Spelling Bee is that it makes me realize just how arbitrary the English language is.SE: “Oh, my goodness! I think about that all the time,” says Sam. … “Today, there was the word narrator in the Spelling Bee,” Sam points out. “Why does that end in or instead of er like other nouns from verbs? And why is it rater instead of rator?” Then there is the classic genre of negative words that have no positive equivalent: You can say “inept” but not “ept.” Sam says, “Just yesterday, I was thinking, why is ‘legalized’ a common word, but not ‘illegalized?’”
2025-10-11Q: How do you decide what words are acceptable?SE: You've got three hours for this, right? The vast majority, in spite of how much this is talked about, the vast majority is very easy. Ball. Yes. Call. Fall. These are all noncontroversial words. … Then there are words I'm not at the risk of one, just totally airing or two, at the risk of being squarely in somebody's wheelhouse. There are words that we'll call them Scrabble Words. They are things that are not even listed in some dictionaries. They're only found in unabridged things. It is this genus of shrub that only lives in this one country in the world. So there needs to be a line drawn somewhere because you want to be able to find as many words as possible. You don't want the reason you didn't get to genius because there are all these Scrabble words. So that's the philosophy around pruning the word list, as I like to say to begin … Then you get to the name of a bird. … There are some birds that are in the Spelling Bee, and there are some birds that aren't. And it seems really, really arbitrary. I'm not laughing at you going, Ha-ha, you love niche birds. No, birds should be in the Spelling Bee. And to be clear, my stance on this has changed over time, allowing more and more birds in the Spelling Bee because everybody has their own bits of, we'll call it a specialized thing. But hey, to you bird lovers out there, it's probably not seemingly specialized to you, right?Q: One [bird that doesn’t make the cut] is anhinga, which drives me crazy because you go to Florida, you see anhingas everywhere. Q: Sam, your rebuttal?SE: No. My rebuttal actually is literally is a non-rebuttal. I guess what I myself have learned my own journey as editor is it's fascinating just how arbitrary language is, words that are accepted in some dictionaries but not accepted in other dictionaries. So Spelling Bee is just yet another lexicon that just has some things and doesn't have others. Then there's that extra layer of making it fun and accessible to such a widespread group of solvers out there. It's a journey, and it's ever evolving.
2026-04-12SE: [Spelling Bee is] 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.Q: 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.
2026-04-12SE: 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."
2026-06-26Q: 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.SE: 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.
Lexicon: Ins and Outs
2022-01-13One 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.
2022-04-19At least Merriam-Webster only has to contend with haters every few years; Ezersky faces them every day. After Spelling Bee is published each day, scores of people email the New York Times complaining about words that it did or didn’t take. Several Twitter accounts with names like “Not a Spelling Bee Word” exist purely to troll Ezersky. When the puzzle didn’t accept the word “raffia” (a decision since overturned) one frustrated player sent yards of the material to the New York Times’s office in protest, along with a threat to follow up with an ortolan (“animals are so dicey”, sighs Ezersky). His biggest critics are members of the sailing community, who rage at him each time he doesn’t accept “alee” (the side of a ship which is sheltered from wind, and a handy one-pointer). Ezersky takes the complaints to heart and often revises his policy if a reader makes a good case: “I’m committed to making this a game for the people.” It’s easier to say what may be “common” to print readers, he says, than to a diverse and geographically dispersed digital audience.
2023-06-05Sam Ezersky, the editor of the New York Times’ popular daily word-finder game Spelling Bee, is less picky these days about the words he allows people to use. … He used to strive to create a consistently expanding word list that always allowed words that were permitted before. His new thinking: If too many people complained about a word that was allowed in the past, maybe don’t allow it in the future. “My goal is to be able to have this game live and breathe and evolve with its audience rather than create some draconian rules,.”
2023-11-21Q: I’m going to ask you a question that some people have asked me to ask you …SE: Is it the S?Q. 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.
2023-11-21Q: I’ve noticed that some words have disappeared. I always try ATTAINT, it’s not there any more.SE: Yes, they have.
2026-04-12SE: I did [use] CHOCOLATE [as] 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.
2022-04-19At least Merriam-Webster only has to contend with haters every few years; Ezersky faces them every day. After Spelling Bee is published each day, scores of people email the New York Times complaining about words that it did or didn’t take. Several Twitter accounts with names like “Not a Spelling Bee Word” exist purely to troll Ezersky. When the puzzle didn’t accept the word “raffia” (a decision since overturned) one frustrated player sent yards of the material to the New York Times’s office in protest, along with a threat to follow up with an ortolan (“animals are so dicey”, sighs Ezersky). His biggest critics are members of the sailing community, who rage at him each time he doesn’t accept “alee” (the side of a ship which is sheltered from wind, and a handy one-pointer). Ezersky takes the complaints to heart and often revises his policy if a reader makes a good case: “I’m committed to making this a game for the people.” It’s easier to say what may be “common” to print readers, he says, than to a diverse and geographically dispersed digital audience.
2023-06-05Sam Ezersky, the editor of the New York Times’ popular daily word-finder game Spelling Bee, is less picky these days about the words he allows people to use. … He used to strive to create a consistently expanding word list that always allowed words that were permitted before. His new thinking: If too many people complained about a word that was allowed in the past, maybe don’t allow it in the future. “My goal is to be able to have this game live and breathe and evolve with its audience rather than create some draconian rules,.”
2023-11-21Q: I’m going to ask you a question that some people have asked me to ask you …SE: Is it the S?Q. 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.
2023-11-21Q: I’ve noticed that some words have disappeared. I always try ATTAINT, it’s not there any more.SE: Yes, they have.
2026-04-12SE: I did [use] CHOCOLATE [as] 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.
Lexicon: Slang, Vulgarities, etc.
2020-10-16“There is a basic framework to the game, and that dictates how I edit,” Mr. Ezersky said. “I start with the following:• No proper nouns or capitalized terms, unless they have a reason for the lowercase context.• No vulgarity or vulgar slang.• No clear variants or British variants on American English words.• Nothing with hyphens or contractions, or anything that’s more regularly written as more than one word.• Nothing so informal that players might say, ‘That’s not really a word … ’
2022-01-13SE: I won’t allow anything vulgar. I also choose not to allow anything that someone could see as a slur. None of that.
2022-04-19He won’t take any word that might double as a slur against a particular community.
2022-04-27He doesn’t include any words that can be used as ethnic slurs, even if that word has an alternate meaning
2022-05-22For starters no vulgar slang or outright slurs; those are instant no-gos.
2023-06-05[Sam E has] become more permissive with slang, especially if solvers keep trying for a word he hadn’t allowed in the past. For example: he’s warmed to “glamp” — slang for “glamorous camping.”
2026-04-12SE: 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. 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.
2026-08-05SE edits for familiarity and avoids a word if its primary definition is considered a slur or a vulgarity, or if it elicits a viscerally negative reaction.
2022-01-13SE: I won’t allow anything vulgar. I also choose not to allow anything that someone could see as a slur. None of that.
2022-04-19He won’t take any word that might double as a slur against a particular community.
2022-04-27He doesn’t include any words that can be used as ethnic slurs, even if that word has an alternate meaning
2022-05-22For starters no vulgar slang or outright slurs; those are instant no-gos.
2023-06-05[Sam E has] become more permissive with slang, especially if solvers keep trying for a word he hadn’t allowed in the past. For example: he’s warmed to “glamp” — slang for “glamorous camping.”
2026-04-12SE: 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. 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.
2026-08-05SE edits for familiarity and avoids a word if its primary definition is considered a slur or a vulgarity, or if it elicits a viscerally negative reaction.
Player Experience: Difficulty
2021-08-31AQ: Are there specific criteria you use for how difficult the puzzle can be? [gives as example the very difficult pangram IMBROGLIO] How do you decide what’s within bounds in terms of difficulty?SE: What I found so interesting about that [Bee with pangram IMBROGLIO] is that that pangram was so difficult and so hard to see, to even stitch together a few letters and then sort of build on, tack on the remaining ones-- But all the other words in the wordlist, I believe, were six letters or fewer and were very, very, very straightforward. I believe that that was a lucky day for me. I don’t believe there was a single marginal line judge call here, as I was referencing earlier. But that pangram was wicked, right? Fully expected a lot of people to really struggle on that pangram or even some people-- I was willing to bet that there would be some people that would find every last word but the pangram until the next day. I usually try and avoid that, though, to be honest. And so a hard puzzle in my mind is: I try and make the puzzle hard, primarily through the actual answers in the puzzle, especially the longer ones that are worth more points, rather than the pangram itself. I thought imbroglio was fair, but really pushing it on difficulty for the pangram alone. I like keeping the pangram as accessible as possible. I actually have a particularly high bar with the pangram alone versus the rest of the wordlist, because that is the lynchpin of the puzzle, right? There are some solvers that won’t even begin solving the rest of their puzzle until they find their pangrams. So I recognize the importance of that. It’s also worth so many points. If you’re not finding the pangram, it’s going to be really hard to gain progress. It’s really based off, you know, the longer bonus words in the word list, which are worth so many points. I think a puzzle can be really difficult if a lot of those longer words are pretty tough as far as vocabulary goes, or somewhat elusive based on the, you know, the formation of prefixes, suffixes, bigrams, trigrams, et cetera.
2021-08-31BQ:Is there a specific criterion you use for how difficult the puzzle can be? As a player, I’ve seen combos of letters that allow for hundreds of options and some that allow for just a few dozen. Some of the words are really hard, especially to get the pangram, which requires all the letters. A few weeks ago, the pangram was IMBROGLIO. I was using my linguist skills, trying out the combinations of letters, probabilistically—doing bigrams and trigrams—as well as solving with an Italian speaker. And it was only because I was doing that, and I had an Italian speaker, that I got imbroglio. How do you decide what’s in bounds, in terms of difficulty?SE: That pangram was so difficult and so hard to see, to stitch together a few letters and then tack on the remaining ones. I believe all the other words in the word list were six letters or fewer and were very, very, very straightforward. That was a lucky day for me. I don’t believe there was a single marginal call, but that pangram was wicked, right? I usually try to avoid that, though. I try to make the puzzle hard primarily through the answers in the puzzle, especially the longer ones that are worth more points, rather than the pangram itself. I have a particularly high bar with the pangram, because that is the linchpin of the puzzle. There are some solvers who won’t even begin solving the rest of the puzzle until they find the pangrams. It’s also worth so many points. If you’re not finding the pangram, it’s going to be really hard to gain progress.
2022-08-14Q: How do you gauge a puzzle’s difficulty?SE: One metric is how long the answer list is. If the puzzle contains many frequently used letters — E, L, T — it might yield at least 100 words, regardless of the center letter. I never offer puzzles with that many words. My golden zone is between 30 and 45 words. Another [metric] is the center letter itself. If a puzzle has a J in the center, that’s not going to be easy. One of my favorites had a Z in the center. It was diabolical but fun. [Z A G I N O R] There were two pangrams — “razoring” and “organizing” — and a bunch of great words like “razzing” and “zigzag.” Who doesn’t love “zigzag”? I’ve ruled out puzzles because other words in the answer list were really tough. A good example is “ebullience.” It’s a tough pangram, and the answer list had “incubi,” “nubbin,” “bluebell,” “leucine” and “nucleic.” It would have be a painstaking road to Genius.
2023-09-11B“I know no brain science around puzzles, but I’ve found that many of the most difficult words to spot are very vowel rich, like ONION, IDEA or EPEE,” the Spelling Bee editor, Sam Ezersky, said. “There’s probably a word like EDGE that you always miss. … I like puzzles that showcase a good vocabulary,” Mr. Ezersky said. “It’s more than just pangrams. I don’t want you to find the rest of the puzzle tedious.” He added that, if the puzzle permitted, he wanted it to have a surprise — words like EYETEETH or EIGHTIETH, for example, that a solver might not necessarily think of instantly, but that give a satisfying “aha” moment when you find them.
2021-08-31BQ:Is there a specific criterion you use for how difficult the puzzle can be? As a player, I’ve seen combos of letters that allow for hundreds of options and some that allow for just a few dozen. Some of the words are really hard, especially to get the pangram, which requires all the letters. A few weeks ago, the pangram was IMBROGLIO. I was using my linguist skills, trying out the combinations of letters, probabilistically—doing bigrams and trigrams—as well as solving with an Italian speaker. And it was only because I was doing that, and I had an Italian speaker, that I got imbroglio. How do you decide what’s in bounds, in terms of difficulty?SE: That pangram was so difficult and so hard to see, to stitch together a few letters and then tack on the remaining ones. I believe all the other words in the word list were six letters or fewer and were very, very, very straightforward. That was a lucky day for me. I don’t believe there was a single marginal call, but that pangram was wicked, right? I usually try to avoid that, though. I try to make the puzzle hard primarily through the answers in the puzzle, especially the longer ones that are worth more points, rather than the pangram itself. I have a particularly high bar with the pangram, because that is the linchpin of the puzzle. There are some solvers who won’t even begin solving the rest of the puzzle until they find the pangrams. It’s also worth so many points. If you’re not finding the pangram, it’s going to be really hard to gain progress.
2022-08-14Q: How do you gauge a puzzle’s difficulty?SE: One metric is how long the answer list is. If the puzzle contains many frequently used letters — E, L, T — it might yield at least 100 words, regardless of the center letter. I never offer puzzles with that many words. My golden zone is between 30 and 45 words. Another [metric] is the center letter itself. If a puzzle has a J in the center, that’s not going to be easy. One of my favorites had a Z in the center. It was diabolical but fun. [Z A G I N O R] There were two pangrams — “razoring” and “organizing” — and a bunch of great words like “razzing” and “zigzag.” Who doesn’t love “zigzag”? I’ve ruled out puzzles because other words in the answer list were really tough. A good example is “ebullience.” It’s a tough pangram, and the answer list had “incubi,” “nubbin,” “bluebell,” “leucine” and “nucleic.” It would have be a painstaking road to Genius.
2023-09-11B“I know no brain science around puzzles, but I’ve found that many of the most difficult words to spot are very vowel rich, like ONION, IDEA or EPEE,” the Spelling Bee editor, Sam Ezersky, said. “There’s probably a word like EDGE that you always miss. … I like puzzles that showcase a good vocabulary,” Mr. Ezersky said. “It’s more than just pangrams. I don’t want you to find the rest of the puzzle tedious.” He added that, if the puzzle permitted, he wanted it to have a surprise — words like EYETEETH or EIGHTIETH, for example, that a solver might not necessarily think of instantly, but that give a satisfying “aha” moment when you find them.
Player Experience: Enjoyment
2020-10-16Spelling Bee was created as an alternative game for those who might not be interested in the New York Times Crossword. As such, it is edited by the game’s editor Sam Ezersky with an eye for words that can be considered familiar to a majority of solvers, as opposed to some of the tougher vocabulary that solvers see in crossword puzzles. “It has to be frustrating to discover something you know is a word — one you might even use regularly — only to see it nullified by the game,” Mr. Ezersky said. “It’s all a balance, though. There’s only one master list for everyone. And one person’s expansive vocabulary or specialized knowledge is another’s obscurity or esoterica. So the playing field must be kept level somehow, and my guiding question these days is, ‘What feels fair for our audience?’”
2022-01-13Q: 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].
2022-05-22SE: [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 achieve Queen 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.
2022-12-01SE: My goal, which is why a game like this needs an editor in general rather than a computer, is to actually come up with the good, enjoyable puzzles. … If the pangram is not something that my audience can even figure out in the first place or is enjoyable to figure out, then what’s the point of the whole puzzle? You don’t want there to be too many words. You don’t want there to be too few words, and you don’t want the longer words to be so hard that it’s going to be impossible for anyone to get the “genius” because the longer words teeter on technical. My goal is, you don’t just want every last word in the dictionary to appear in this puzzle, or nobody’s ever going to get to “genius,” right?
2023-11-21SE: I’m always trying to offer a good bit of variety, because I know … 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.”
2023-11-21SE: 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, because that word had mistakenly been left out of one Bee during the pandemic] – 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.Q: Has SB increased subscriptions?SE: It certainly has. But I just want people to have fun.
2025-10-11Q: Generally speaking, what makes a good game?SE: I like a feeling. I try and put myself in the shoes of the solver. That's, I'd say, really just a lot of what we do in editing our games. My golden rule is you keep the solver in mind throughout your entire process. So one of the things for me, especially puzzles, maybe even juxtaposed with games, is you really just want to feel a sense of accomplishment somehow. Even if that is just your daily jolt from your wordle every day and keeping up your streak or your mini crossword or cracking the code on a tough crossword theme early, I think what makes a good puzzle is being able to feel a sense of achievement. You get for nothing else, you get that dose of dopamine that says, I did it.
2026-06-26Q: 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.
2022-01-13Q: 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].
2022-05-22SE: [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 achieve Queen 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.
2022-12-01SE: My goal, which is why a game like this needs an editor in general rather than a computer, is to actually come up with the good, enjoyable puzzles. … If the pangram is not something that my audience can even figure out in the first place or is enjoyable to figure out, then what’s the point of the whole puzzle? You don’t want there to be too many words. You don’t want there to be too few words, and you don’t want the longer words to be so hard that it’s going to be impossible for anyone to get the “genius” because the longer words teeter on technical. My goal is, you don’t just want every last word in the dictionary to appear in this puzzle, or nobody’s ever going to get to “genius,” right?
2023-11-21SE: I’m always trying to offer a good bit of variety, because I know … 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.”
2023-11-21SE: 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, because that word had mistakenly been left out of one Bee during the pandemic] – 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.Q: Has SB increased subscriptions?SE: It certainly has. But I just want people to have fun.
2025-10-11Q: Generally speaking, what makes a good game?SE: I like a feeling. I try and put myself in the shoes of the solver. That's, I'd say, really just a lot of what we do in editing our games. My golden rule is you keep the solver in mind throughout your entire process. So one of the things for me, especially puzzles, maybe even juxtaposed with games, is you really just want to feel a sense of accomplishment somehow. Even if that is just your daily jolt from your wordle every day and keeping up your streak or your mini crossword or cracking the code on a tough crossword theme early, I think what makes a good puzzle is being able to feel a sense of achievement. You get for nothing else, you get that dose of dopamine that says, I did it.
2026-06-26Q: 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.
Player Experience: Ranks
2021-02-24Q: Talk a little bit about the Queen Bee level, which is this sort of secret Easter egg level that isn't advertised on the game. SE: Funny story that's sort of why we keep the Queen Bee as an Easter Egg. We want our solvers to feel that great sense of accomplishment in that you don't need to find every last word... Everybody has their own personal lexicon of words they do and don't know. So just missing a word that one person finds to be esoteric and oh, you failed to get the 100% mark. That just doesn't feel great, right? I think there's something so satisfying about those Great, Amazing, Genius levels—really, whatever level you aspire to, that's publicly there. And then if you're just some solving heavyweight who seeks perfection, who knows, who has some super expansive lexicon, who's dying to see the breakdowns on Twitter [this is pre-Spelling Bee forum] or other people sharing exactly how many words there are, then that pursuit is for you. The way we've done it, there's something in this puzzle for every solver that way, which is why we keep the Queen Bee as we do.
2021-02-24SE: Less than a third of our total players get to Genius on a given day and we'll say a very, very, very slim percentage get to the Queen Bee. Despite all those screenshots you might see on Twitter. It's, it's actually a nice reminder to me as editor. I love the Queen Bee folks. I love the tenacity, but it's a really, really small subset of our solvers. It's pretty fascinating.
2021-11-10Q: The beauty of [Spelling Bee] 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]
2021-11-10SE: 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.]
2022-05-22SE: [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 achieve Queen 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.
2021-02-24SE: Less than a third of our total players get to Genius on a given day and we'll say a very, very, very slim percentage get to the Queen Bee. Despite all those screenshots you might see on Twitter. It's, it's actually a nice reminder to me as editor. I love the Queen Bee folks. I love the tenacity, but it's a really, really small subset of our solvers. It's pretty fascinating.
2021-11-10Q: The beauty of [Spelling Bee] 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]
2021-11-10SE: 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.]
2022-05-22SE: [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 achieve Queen 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.
Player Experience: Solving Tips
2022-08-14Q: How the heck do I get better at this game?SE: It’s a game of pattern rather than memory. If you type your letters in a different arrangement, you can connect bridges that you weren’t seeing before. Use the shuffle button or even Scrabble tiles. That said, memory can be helpful. Remember your vowel-rich words like “onion,” “onto,” “idea” and “algae.” These are going to show up in plenty of Bees, but they’re tough to see. My last bit of advice is to come back to it. Give your brain a break, and you’ll see something you didn’t see before.
2022-12-01Q: Do you have tips for people who want to get started with the Bee or who just want to get better at it?SE: I’d say first and foremost, in a sphere where word games tend to be daunting or “for word people,” you know more than you think you do. And you get to set your own goals playing this game. Whether you are a lexicographer by trade or you don’t even like to read, you know words. You get to see your progress as you solve some words, and I’d say, this is extremely cliché, but you get better over time. Your brain molds to seeing—it’s like the Tetris effect. It’s when you play Tetris for so long you just know how the shapes are going to fit in. Your brain automatically kind of has that muscle memory to know, like OK, you’ve got to turn this log around. It’s going to fit really nicely in there. So with something like Spelling Bee, your brain is naturally just going to get better at recognizing certain blends of letters and word patterns. If you’re stumped, if you’re like, I know there are a lot more words there but I’m not seeing them, or you’re actively trying to get the “genius,” I like putting a few letters at once that you know are going to be blends, even if they’re not a prefix or a suffix. Like you know that the letters C and L followed by a vowel are either going to start a word or be embedded somewhere in the word. It’s building those and recognizing those patterns over time that I’d say really helps you up your game. My single favorite tip is the vaguest one. It sounds the most unhelpful, but I promise it’s the most helpful tip of them all: No matter how experienced you are at this game, come back to it. Take a break. Stumped? Put it down for 15 minutes. Come back. You will be shocked at how much you can see that you didn’t see prior. That goes for all sorts of word games. It’s an incredible phenomenon. Your brain’s just going to jump to a different path that you hadn’t considered before, and it’s nice to just have that fresh look.
2022-12-01Q: Do you have tips for people who want to get started with the Bee or who just want to get better at it?SE: I’d say first and foremost, in a sphere where word games tend to be daunting or “for word people,” you know more than you think you do. And you get to set your own goals playing this game. Whether you are a lexicographer by trade or you don’t even like to read, you know words. You get to see your progress as you solve some words, and I’d say, this is extremely cliché, but you get better over time. Your brain molds to seeing—it’s like the Tetris effect. It’s when you play Tetris for so long you just know how the shapes are going to fit in. Your brain automatically kind of has that muscle memory to know, like OK, you’ve got to turn this log around. It’s going to fit really nicely in there. So with something like Spelling Bee, your brain is naturally just going to get better at recognizing certain blends of letters and word patterns. If you’re stumped, if you’re like, I know there are a lot more words there but I’m not seeing them, or you’re actively trying to get the “genius,” I like putting a few letters at once that you know are going to be blends, even if they’re not a prefix or a suffix. Like you know that the letters C and L followed by a vowel are either going to start a word or be embedded somewhere in the word. It’s building those and recognizing those patterns over time that I’d say really helps you up your game. My single favorite tip is the vaguest one. It sounds the most unhelpful, but I promise it’s the most helpful tip of them all: No matter how experienced you are at this game, come back to it. Take a break. Stumped? Put it down for 15 minutes. Come back. You will be shocked at how much you can see that you didn’t see prior. That goes for all sorts of word games. It’s an incredible phenomenon. Your brain’s just going to jump to a different path that you hadn’t considered before, and it’s nice to just have that fresh look.
Puzzle Tech and Interface
2023-05-30[when past puzzles were enabled] Sam Ezersky, Spelling Bee’s digital editor since its inception, added: “Truly, this is such exciting news! I know firsthand how each solver has a unique sweet spot when it comes to enjoying these puzzles. Whether this means going back much later to achieve a higher ranking, or saving days’ worth of content for one sitting, it should open up a whole new dimension of possibilities.”
2023-11-21Q: 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.
2023-11-21Q: 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.
2026-04-12HOST: 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.
2023-11-21Q: 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.
2023-11-21Q: 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.
2026-04-12HOST: 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.
Special Puzzles
2022-08-14Q: Dear ’am, Why don’t you ever include the letter S in ’pelling Bee? There are ’o many good word that have been left by the ’ide of the road!SE: I love the letter S — it’s my favorite besides Z. But if every other word is a plural, it can make for tedious solving. That said, I’ve avoided “-ed” and “-ing” for the longest time, and now there are some puzzles where most words end in “-ing.” I feel a little different about S, but never say never.
2022-08-14Q: Do you ever change puzzles based on current events?SE: I held off for a long time on “infection.” It’s part of a pangram set that includes “confetti,” “confection” and “coefficient,” so it’s nice from a word-brain perspective. But I know that many enjoy this game as a diversion from the world — and the news cycle — around us. We finally used it two years into the pandemic, on April 27 of this year, with F in the center.
2023-09-11AMr. Ezersky said the puzzles don’t generally have themes — but he will break one out for special occasions. “It’s cool to run themed puzzles, like when the pangram was VALENTINE on Feb. 14,” he said, but there are also coincidences. “The pangram was FURLONG on the day of the Kentucky Derby, and that was totally by accident,” he noted.
2025-03-12B[re: the first use of S in the Bee on 2025-03-12]Q: Why the “S” now?SE: The 2,500th Spelling Bee felt like a good time to try something new and exciting. I chose this puzzle because it’s a good intro to the magic you can have with the letter “S.” Today there will be many fun words you can make that have never appeared in Spelling Bee history, including an appropriate pangram for the occasion.Q: What does this milestone mean to you?SE: Spelling Bee would not have reached the success it has today without the community discussion and passion from the NYT Games community. This special puzzle is a ‘thank you’ to the community who has asked for this and I hope will continue to push Spelling Bee forward to more milestones to come.
2025-03-12ASE: Hi everybody, it’s your friendly neighborhood SB editor Sam Ezersky here. You all gotta try today’s puzzle. It’s the first in the digital Spelling Bee’s history to contain the letter S. Plurals are a thing now, guys! All 25 other letters have been included at least once, twice, ten plus times. But never the letter S, because, well, plurals can be tedious, you don’t want the puzzle to be too big, I don’t know. We have shied away from this, and at this point, it’s kind of a meme. But that all changes today. So you all might be wondering, are you going to need to solve this puzzle any differently than normal? I’d say no, on the whole, but one tip or trick I might have to offer is, let’s say you find a noun: Don’t forget to tack on an S at the end if it doesn’t have the S in it. Some words you might find might come in twos, the singular and the plural. So don’t forget, if you do one, do the other along the way. “Now, are we ever gonna see another puzzle with the S in it? So, I can say— Hold on, I’m getting another call, gotta run!
2025-03-17[re: the first use of S in the Bee on 2025-03-12]It was easy to see why Sam Ezersky, the Spelling Bee editor, has long opted to keep the letter out of the game. He told me as much when I asked him about it, noting that a rote exercise in pluralizing words wasn’t much of a puzzle. “You want the game to offer a variety of ‘ahas,’ rather than feel like a chore to the finish line,” Sam said.
2025-04-06[re: the first use of S in the Bee on 2025-03-12]Mr. Ezersky couldn’t stop readers from wanting [the letter S in the Spelling Bee].“I could never have told you that this would be something that scores and scores of solvers would be clamoring for up to this point,” he said in an interview.Mr. Ezersky always thought he might have to give in. He and the New York Times Games team decided to include an S on March 12, in Spelling Bee’s 2,500th puzzle.The letters were F-L-O-S-U-A-B, with F in the middle. The “pangram,” or answer that uses every letter in the set, was FABULOUS, chosen to match the moment. The puzzle also contained words without S that a Spelling Bee puzzle had never included before, like BUFFALO, where Mr. Ezersky lives. Mr. Ezersky carefully chose the other letters to limit plural opportunities. He omitted E and T, which commonly end words pluralized with S, and he included F and B to limit common words.Solvers celebrated … but other solvers had mixed feelings. Mr. Ezersky said he heard from people who expressed disappointment with the S. As predicted, the option for plurals made the game feel easy. BLUFF could become BLUFFS; one FOOL might be joined by other FOOLS.Mr. Ezersky knows from his seven years on the job that there will be good puzzles and bad puzzles. But he is open to including S in the future.“It’s a whole phenomenon attached to the game,” he said of the S, adding that he was “really excited to sort of tear that all down.”
2026-06-26Q: 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.SE: 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.
2022-08-14Q: Do you ever change puzzles based on current events?SE: I held off for a long time on “infection.” It’s part of a pangram set that includes “confetti,” “confection” and “coefficient,” so it’s nice from a word-brain perspective. But I know that many enjoy this game as a diversion from the world — and the news cycle — around us. We finally used it two years into the pandemic, on April 27 of this year, with F in the center.
2023-09-11AMr. Ezersky said the puzzles don’t generally have themes — but he will break one out for special occasions. “It’s cool to run themed puzzles, like when the pangram was VALENTINE on Feb. 14,” he said, but there are also coincidences. “The pangram was FURLONG on the day of the Kentucky Derby, and that was totally by accident,” he noted.
2025-03-12B[re: the first use of S in the Bee on 2025-03-12]Q: Why the “S” now?SE: The 2,500th Spelling Bee felt like a good time to try something new and exciting. I chose this puzzle because it’s a good intro to the magic you can have with the letter “S.” Today there will be many fun words you can make that have never appeared in Spelling Bee history, including an appropriate pangram for the occasion.Q: What does this milestone mean to you?SE: Spelling Bee would not have reached the success it has today without the community discussion and passion from the NYT Games community. This special puzzle is a ‘thank you’ to the community who has asked for this and I hope will continue to push Spelling Bee forward to more milestones to come.
2025-03-12ASE: Hi everybody, it’s your friendly neighborhood SB editor Sam Ezersky here. You all gotta try today’s puzzle. It’s the first in the digital Spelling Bee’s history to contain the letter S. Plurals are a thing now, guys! All 25 other letters have been included at least once, twice, ten plus times. But never the letter S, because, well, plurals can be tedious, you don’t want the puzzle to be too big, I don’t know. We have shied away from this, and at this point, it’s kind of a meme. But that all changes today. So you all might be wondering, are you going to need to solve this puzzle any differently than normal? I’d say no, on the whole, but one tip or trick I might have to offer is, let’s say you find a noun: Don’t forget to tack on an S at the end if it doesn’t have the S in it. Some words you might find might come in twos, the singular and the plural. So don’t forget, if you do one, do the other along the way. “Now, are we ever gonna see another puzzle with the S in it? So, I can say— Hold on, I’m getting another call, gotta run!
2025-03-17[re: the first use of S in the Bee on 2025-03-12]It was easy to see why Sam Ezersky, the Spelling Bee editor, has long opted to keep the letter out of the game. He told me as much when I asked him about it, noting that a rote exercise in pluralizing words wasn’t much of a puzzle. “You want the game to offer a variety of ‘ahas,’ rather than feel like a chore to the finish line,” Sam said.
2025-04-06[re: the first use of S in the Bee on 2025-03-12]Mr. Ezersky couldn’t stop readers from wanting [the letter S in the Spelling Bee].“I could never have told you that this would be something that scores and scores of solvers would be clamoring for up to this point,” he said in an interview.Mr. Ezersky always thought he might have to give in. He and the New York Times Games team decided to include an S on March 12, in Spelling Bee’s 2,500th puzzle.The letters were F-L-O-S-U-A-B, with F in the middle. The “pangram,” or answer that uses every letter in the set, was FABULOUS, chosen to match the moment. The puzzle also contained words without S that a Spelling Bee puzzle had never included before, like BUFFALO, where Mr. Ezersky lives. Mr. Ezersky carefully chose the other letters to limit plural opportunities. He omitted E and T, which commonly end words pluralized with S, and he included F and B to limit common words.Solvers celebrated … but other solvers had mixed feelings. Mr. Ezersky said he heard from people who expressed disappointment with the S. As predicted, the option for plurals made the game feel easy. BLUFF could become BLUFFS; one FOOL might be joined by other FOOLS.Mr. Ezersky knows from his seven years on the job that there will be good puzzles and bad puzzles. But he is open to including S in the future.“It’s a whole phenomenon attached to the game,” he said of the S, adding that he was “really excited to sort of tear that all down.”
2026-06-26Q: 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.SE: 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.
What Sam Says About (Nearly) Everything: Sources
2018-09-20Comment by Sam E in Wordplay column:https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/19/crosswords/daily-puzzle-2018-09-20.html#permid=28682144
2019-07-16Sam E tweets text of email he had sent to a solver 2019-07-16https://x.com/thegridkid/status/1151188527423643649
2020-10-16The Genius of Spelling BeeNew York Times, October 16, 2020; updated Aug. 31, 2022https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/16/crosswords/spellingbee-puzzles.html
2021-02-24Secrets of the New York Times Spelling BeeCulture Gabfest, February 24, 2021https://podcasts.musixmatch.com/podcast/culture-gabfest-01hvbyrfsgsjjt60fg2gnatrx0/episode/secrets-of-the-new-york-times-spelling-bee-01hw7tj7pt6s89kk2qtcdwdxdv
2021-08-31AHow the Grid Kid Became King of the Online Spelling BeeSpectacular Vernacular (Slate podcast), August 31, 2021https://slate.com/podcasts/spectacular-vernacular/2021/08/are-you-spectacular-vernaculars-next-spelling-bee-champion
2021-08-31BInsider Secrets of the Spelling Bee: The New York Times’ Sam Ezersky reveals all.Slate, August 31, 2021https://slate.com/culture/2021/08/nyt-spelling-bee-sam-ezersky.html
2021-11-10The Quest for Queen BeeThe Keith Law Show, November 10, 2021 (44 minutes) (SE segment begins at 5:54; SB discussion begins around 15:40)https://podcasts.apple.com/sc/podcast/the-quest-for-queen-bee-w-sam-ezersky/id1499877854?i=1000541286581
2021-12-09How the Hivemind Conquers Spelling BeeNew York Times, December 09, 2021https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/09/crosswords/spellingbee-tips.html
2022-01-13The New York Times Spelling BeeAll of It with Alison Stewart, WNYC, January 13, 2022 (Interview with SE, 13 minutes)https://www.wnyc.org/story/new-york-times-spelling-bee/
2022-04-19The Wordle hurdle: the pitfalls of setting puzzles [interview with Sam Ezersky mostly re: Spelling Bee]Abigail Fielding-SmithThe Economist, April 19, 2022https://www.economist.com/1843/2022/04/19/the-wordle-hurdle-the-pitfalls-of-setting-puzzles archived here: https://archive.ph/Ucydu
2022-04-27How Word Puzzles Tickle the Brain and Satisfy the SoulLiterary Hub, April 27, 2022https://lithub.com/how-word-puzzles-tickle-the-brain-and-satisfy-the-soul/
2022-05-22The 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
2022-08-14Your Spelling Bee Questions, AnsweredNew York Times, August 14, 2022https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/14/briefing/spelling-bee-questions-and-answers.html
2022-12-01The Bee Keeper: A conversation with Sam Ezersky (Engr ‘17), the editor of The New York Times’ buzzy word game.Virginia Magazine (UVA Alumni Association), Winter 2022https://digital.uvamagazine.org/articles/bee-keeper/
2022-12-29A Spelling Bee That Rocked the ForumNew York Times, December 29, 2022https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/29/crosswords/spelling-bee-community-talking-about.html
2023-03-03Every Single Pangram of 2022: A recap of all the Spelling Bee puzzles from the last year.New York Times, January 3, 2023https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/03/crosswords/all-spelling-bee-pangrams.html
2023-05-30Introducing Spelling Bee past puzzlesNew York Times News Release, May 30, 2023https://www.nytco.com/press/spelling-bee-past-puzzles/
2023-06-05Spelling Bee’s evolving word listAxios, June 05, 2023https://www.axios.com/2023/06/05/spelling-bee-evolving-word-list [paywall]
2023-09-11AGetting to Genius, Part 1: Spelling Bee for BeginnersNew York Times, September 11, 2023https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/11/crosswords/getting-to-genius-part-1.html
2023-09-11BGetting to Genius, Part 2: Becoming Queen BeeNew York Times, September 11, 2023https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/11/crosswords/getting-to-genius-part-2.html
2023-11-21An 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
2023-12-01The ‘New York Times’ Spelling Bee Editor is Proud of His Baltimore RootsBaltimore Magazine, December 2023https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/section/artsentertainment/new-york-times-spelling-bee-editor-sam-ezersky-pikesville-roots/
2023-12-19Inside the New York Times' Big Bet on GamesVanity Fair, December 19, 2023https://www.vanityfair.com/news/inside-the-new-york-times-big-bet-on-games
2024-04-14Sam E answers a Q from a solver 2024-04-14https://www.tiktok.com/@thegamesteam/video/7357803650892320042
2024-04-30Part of being the Spelling Bee editor means answering to the 🐝 hive mind 🐝. Sam Ezersky shares his most unexpected moments on the job.New York Times Instagram, April 30, 2024https://www.instagram.com/reel/C6Y8AjKuUmJ/
2024-05-03ANobody’s doing it like Steve G and the Spelling Bee hint writers. We chatted with editor Sam Ezersky about the heroes of the hive mind.New York Times Instagram, May 03, 2024https://www.instagram.com/mynytimes/reel/C6hGGQbRK09/
2024-05-03AEditor Sam Ezersky has some choice words for Spelling Bee hint writer Steve G. 👀👀New York Times Instagram, May 03, 2024https://www.instagram.com/p/C6gjZAzu4cf/
2024-05-20Putting New York Times Games to the Test: Meet some of the people who play each game and solve each puzzle before subscribers see them.New York Times, May 20 2024https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/20/crosswords/nyt-games-puzzles-testing.html
2024-07-06Personal communication from New York Times Customer Care to LexiConnexxions, July 6, 2024.
2024-09-03Why do we have human games editors? [Spelling Bee Editor Sam Ezersky explains.]New York Times Instagram, September 03, 2024https://www.instagram.com/reel/C_dZxiaR_de/
2025-03-12AVideo message from Sam Ezersky about the March 12, 2025 Spelling BeeThreads, March 12, 2025https://www.threads.net/@nytgames/post/DHGPR0oOhLr?xmt=AQGzIBpmlO3sYRG72FS6B6s8r-hEtrDeZuEdIlyvn5nNDw
2025-03-12BTo Celebrate the 2,500th Spelling Bee Puzzle, NYT Games Thanks Its Most Scrupulous Spellers with a Special SolveNew York Times News Release, March 12, 2025https://www.nytco.com/press/celebrating-the-2500th-spelling-bee-puzzle/
2025-03-17Sam Corbin, Gameplay Newsletter, New York Times, Mar 17, 2025
2025-04-06Times Insider: Spelling Bee Lets Solvers Have Plurals (for One Day)New York Times, April 6 2025https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/06/pageoneplus/spelling-bee-s.html
2025-10-11Podcast: The Pyrotechnics of Puzzles: How NYT Games are madeNew York Times ‘The Daily’https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/11/podcasts/the-daily/nyt-games-connections-crossword.html
2026-04-12Hello Puzzlers Podcast: Special Guest Sam EzerskyApr 12 2026https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMrHaTEppvg
2026-06-26Sam Ezersky Q&A in the Spelling Bee forum, 2026-06-26https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/26/crosswords/spelling-bee-forum.html#permid=152133683
2026-08-05Why You Sometimes See Naughty Words in NYT GamesNew York Times, August 5, 2026https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/05/insider/games-language-wordle-crossplay-spelling-bee.html
2019-07-16Sam E tweets text of email he had sent to a solver 2019-07-16https://x.com/thegridkid/status/1151188527423643649
2020-10-16The Genius of Spelling BeeNew York Times, October 16, 2020; updated Aug. 31, 2022https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/16/crosswords/spellingbee-puzzles.html
2021-02-24Secrets of the New York Times Spelling BeeCulture Gabfest, February 24, 2021https://podcasts.musixmatch.com/podcast/culture-gabfest-01hvbyrfsgsjjt60fg2gnatrx0/episode/secrets-of-the-new-york-times-spelling-bee-01hw7tj7pt6s89kk2qtcdwdxdv
2021-08-31AHow the Grid Kid Became King of the Online Spelling BeeSpectacular Vernacular (Slate podcast), August 31, 2021https://slate.com/podcasts/spectacular-vernacular/2021/08/are-you-spectacular-vernaculars-next-spelling-bee-champion
2021-08-31BInsider Secrets of the Spelling Bee: The New York Times’ Sam Ezersky reveals all.Slate, August 31, 2021https://slate.com/culture/2021/08/nyt-spelling-bee-sam-ezersky.html
2021-11-10The Quest for Queen BeeThe Keith Law Show, November 10, 2021 (44 minutes) (SE segment begins at 5:54; SB discussion begins around 15:40)https://podcasts.apple.com/sc/podcast/the-quest-for-queen-bee-w-sam-ezersky/id1499877854?i=1000541286581
2021-12-09How the Hivemind Conquers Spelling BeeNew York Times, December 09, 2021https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/09/crosswords/spellingbee-tips.html
2022-01-13The New York Times Spelling BeeAll of It with Alison Stewart, WNYC, January 13, 2022 (Interview with SE, 13 minutes)https://www.wnyc.org/story/new-york-times-spelling-bee/
2022-04-19The Wordle hurdle: the pitfalls of setting puzzles [interview with Sam Ezersky mostly re: Spelling Bee]Abigail Fielding-SmithThe Economist, April 19, 2022https://www.economist.com/1843/2022/04/19/the-wordle-hurdle-the-pitfalls-of-setting-puzzles archived here: https://archive.ph/Ucydu
2022-04-27How Word Puzzles Tickle the Brain and Satisfy the SoulLiterary Hub, April 27, 2022https://lithub.com/how-word-puzzles-tickle-the-brain-and-satisfy-the-soul/
2022-05-22The 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
2022-08-14Your Spelling Bee Questions, AnsweredNew York Times, August 14, 2022https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/14/briefing/spelling-bee-questions-and-answers.html
2022-12-01The Bee Keeper: A conversation with Sam Ezersky (Engr ‘17), the editor of The New York Times’ buzzy word game.Virginia Magazine (UVA Alumni Association), Winter 2022https://digital.uvamagazine.org/articles/bee-keeper/
2022-12-29A Spelling Bee That Rocked the ForumNew York Times, December 29, 2022https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/29/crosswords/spelling-bee-community-talking-about.html
2023-03-03Every Single Pangram of 2022: A recap of all the Spelling Bee puzzles from the last year.New York Times, January 3, 2023https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/03/crosswords/all-spelling-bee-pangrams.html
2023-05-30Introducing Spelling Bee past puzzlesNew York Times News Release, May 30, 2023https://www.nytco.com/press/spelling-bee-past-puzzles/
2023-06-05Spelling Bee’s evolving word listAxios, June 05, 2023https://www.axios.com/2023/06/05/spelling-bee-evolving-word-list [paywall]
2023-09-11AGetting to Genius, Part 1: Spelling Bee for BeginnersNew York Times, September 11, 2023https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/11/crosswords/getting-to-genius-part-1.html
2023-09-11BGetting to Genius, Part 2: Becoming Queen BeeNew York Times, September 11, 2023https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/11/crosswords/getting-to-genius-part-2.html
2023-11-21An 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
2023-12-01The ‘New York Times’ Spelling Bee Editor is Proud of His Baltimore RootsBaltimore Magazine, December 2023https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/section/artsentertainment/new-york-times-spelling-bee-editor-sam-ezersky-pikesville-roots/
2023-12-19Inside the New York Times' Big Bet on GamesVanity Fair, December 19, 2023https://www.vanityfair.com/news/inside-the-new-york-times-big-bet-on-games
2024-04-14Sam E answers a Q from a solver 2024-04-14https://www.tiktok.com/@thegamesteam/video/7357803650892320042
2024-04-30Part of being the Spelling Bee editor means answering to the 🐝 hive mind 🐝. Sam Ezersky shares his most unexpected moments on the job.New York Times Instagram, April 30, 2024https://www.instagram.com/reel/C6Y8AjKuUmJ/
2024-05-03ANobody’s doing it like Steve G and the Spelling Bee hint writers. We chatted with editor Sam Ezersky about the heroes of the hive mind.New York Times Instagram, May 03, 2024https://www.instagram.com/mynytimes/reel/C6hGGQbRK09/
2024-05-03AEditor Sam Ezersky has some choice words for Spelling Bee hint writer Steve G. 👀👀New York Times Instagram, May 03, 2024https://www.instagram.com/p/C6gjZAzu4cf/
2024-05-20Putting New York Times Games to the Test: Meet some of the people who play each game and solve each puzzle before subscribers see them.New York Times, May 20 2024https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/20/crosswords/nyt-games-puzzles-testing.html
2024-07-06Personal communication from New York Times Customer Care to LexiConnexxions, July 6, 2024.
2024-09-03Why do we have human games editors? [Spelling Bee Editor Sam Ezersky explains.]New York Times Instagram, September 03, 2024https://www.instagram.com/reel/C_dZxiaR_de/
2025-03-12AVideo message from Sam Ezersky about the March 12, 2025 Spelling BeeThreads, March 12, 2025https://www.threads.net/@nytgames/post/DHGPR0oOhLr?xmt=AQGzIBpmlO3sYRG72FS6B6s8r-hEtrDeZuEdIlyvn5nNDw
2025-03-12BTo Celebrate the 2,500th Spelling Bee Puzzle, NYT Games Thanks Its Most Scrupulous Spellers with a Special SolveNew York Times News Release, March 12, 2025https://www.nytco.com/press/celebrating-the-2500th-spelling-bee-puzzle/
2025-03-17Sam Corbin, Gameplay Newsletter, New York Times, Mar 17, 2025
2025-04-06Times Insider: Spelling Bee Lets Solvers Have Plurals (for One Day)New York Times, April 6 2025https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/06/pageoneplus/spelling-bee-s.html
2025-10-11Podcast: The Pyrotechnics of Puzzles: How NYT Games are madeNew York Times ‘The Daily’https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/11/podcasts/the-daily/nyt-games-connections-crossword.html
2026-04-12Hello Puzzlers Podcast: Special Guest Sam EzerskyApr 12 2026https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMrHaTEppvg
2026-06-26Sam Ezersky Q&A in the Spelling Bee forum, 2026-06-26https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/26/crosswords/spelling-bee-forum.html#permid=152133683
2026-08-05Why You Sometimes See Naughty Words in NYT GamesNew York Times, August 5, 2026https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/05/insider/games-language-wordle-crossplay-spelling-bee.html