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The minimum puzzle length for spelling bee is 20 words iirc. The dictionary is also a highly curated list of “common” words. What constitutes a valid word is up
by spyspy 3y ago
The minimum puzzle length for spelling bee is 20 words iirc. The dictionary is also a highly curated list of “common” words. What constitutes a valid word is up to Sam, the NYT editor. It’s designed to make the puzzles doable by the average solver. You’ll notice that a lot of the words in the OP are very esoteric.
Source: helped build SB at NYT.
- namanyayg 3y ago> Source: helped build SB at NYT. Wow. Another example of HN at its finest. Great work on the game btw. My gf introduced me to the game and we love it. Though, we play a variation of it against one another in which we open the game on a single screen and whoever finds a pangram first wins.
- angiosperm 3y agoTo share remotely, one player gets halfway to genius, pangram forbidden, and the second player gets over the line. After that you use SB Buddy (no peeking at hints) to get to Queeen Bee. The most annoying missing wordlist words are naphtha and caracal. An objective measure of word-use frequency should determine the words included. Probably super-obscure articles of clerical costume should not be.
- tptacek 3y agoSo you need a 10-letter pangram that generates like 19 4-letter words. :)
- llimllib 3y agoThanks for the insight! There's no actual answer to the question, given that the word list can be set inconsistently, so I had to choose _something_ to go off. The best word list I was able to find is the one hosted by https://www.sbsolver.com/ https://www.sbsolver.com/ , but unfortunately they don't distribute it. I got a somewhat better word list for part 2: https://notes.billmill.org/blog/2024/03/mitzVah_-_the__worst__pangrams_part_2.html https://notes.billmill.org/blog/2024/03/mitzVah_-_the__worst... But it's still imperfect. However a lot of the words I expected to be invalid have actually been in puzzles before, so it's not easy to guess which are going to be good and which aren't. edit: there have been puzzles with as few as 16 words before: https://www.sbsolver.com/stats/count/low https://www.sbsolver.com/stats/count/low edit 2: I modified the program to print puzzles with at least 16 words, and the "worst" puzzles it found with that constraint are: unbEknown, jawbonE, monadnocK, woRkgRoup, daGlock, moonwalK, confLux, buLLhorn, yOkOzuna, Fraught, hogliKe
- spyspy 3y agoThey've loosened up the rules since I left many moons ago, likely to expand number of puzzles without repeats. IIRC we had about 5 years worth at the beginning.
- dmurray 3y agoI think your word list is still considerably too large. Zero chance in my mind that jouk or qajaq, for example, would make it to the NYT wordlist. (I don't think they'd even be accepted in the crossword, which has looser standards, unless there was a very specific theme that called for them). Apart from being obscure, their only use seems to be as non-standard spellings, for juke and kayak respectively. The Spelling Bee doesn't even accept UK spellings. At least 5 of the proposed pangrams wouldn't make the cut, either.
- llimllib 3y agoI agree with you, do you have a better one? I can only work with what I have
- l0b0 3y ago[1] has a couple of references to lists of common words used as inspiration. [1] https://gitlab.com/engmark/xkcd-passphrase-generator https://gitlab.com/engmark/xkcd-passphrase-generator
- dmurray 3y agoPerhaps you could scrape https://nytbee.com/ https://nytbee.com/, mentioned in the thread, for the historical answers, or contact the owner. Also @banana_giraffe, a commenter on this thread, seems to have scraped 6 years of data. Then you could take a very permissive wordlist and filter it using the historical data. For all words of six distinct letters or fewer, you could determine whether they were allowed, not allowed, or indeterminate (no puzzle ever appeared that would have allowed them). My gut feeling is that you'd be left with very few indeterminate words, though jouk and qajaq might well be among them - review those manually.
- ddejohn 3y agoVery cool, thanks! I play every morning. There are times when Sam's curation is very frustrating. It would be nice to submit other valid words and have the game verify them as a way to score "bonus" points. Oftentimes I find that there are some baffling omissions and, after the fact, some truly bizarre inclusions. It would be nice to be able to score points based on your own vocabulary while still having the game's score based on whatever common denominator Sam comes up with.
- dsjoerg 3y agoAgreed, I get frustrated a few days a week with curation inclusions and exclusions. DOORYARD, MICROMINI, NONCOM, ROMCOM are in the list and IMO shouldn't be. UNTENDED, MONOTONIC, BOLE are not in the list but IMO deserve to be.
- StefanBatory 3y agoAs a nonnative speaker it's first time ever I've heard word "bole" being used
- gomox 3y agoI still remember my disappointment when I entered HEMOPHAGE and it was deemed "not a valid word".
- angiosperm 3y agonaphtha and caracal.
- dmurray 3y agoAnd naphthalene, which would have been a pangram that day.
- themadturk 3y agoI seem to remember both those words were put forward in the hints page, too!
- banana_giraffe 3y agoThat may be the target, but there have been a handful of Spelling Bees with less than 20 words in the answer list. For instance, March 27, 2023 had 16 answers: > MORTIFY, FORTIFY, FIFTY, FORTY, MOTIF, FIRM, FOOT, FORM, FORT, FROM, IFFY, MIFF, RIFF, RIFT, ROOF, TIFF
- darth_aardvark 3y agoToot, trot, tort, and moot aren't legal?
- ztravis 3y agoFrom the list of words, I think F was the required (central) letter.
- ajkjk 3y agoYou have to use the center letter, whatever it was.
- banana_giraffe 3y agoAs others have pointed out, all words must have the center letter, which was "F" on this day, the outer letters were "I M O R T Y"
- spyspy 3y agoVery possible. The've loosened the rules have a bit since I originally generated the puzzles e.g. they now allow more than one vowel, i+n+g and e+d are allowed in puzzles, possibly more
- angiosperm 3y agothe "ed" and "ing" puzzles are just annoying.
- JadeNB 3y ago> The've loosened the rules have a bit since I originally generated the puzzles e.g. they now allow more than one vowel, …. The original Bees allowed only one vowel? That must have made it really tough to get long Bees!
- tzs 3y agoIs it the same dictionary Letter Boxed uses?
- schoen 3y agoDefinitely not! I play both and Letter Boxed accepts many more words.
- dehrmann 3y ago> What constitutes a valid word is up to Sam, the NYT editor I think the only listed words I'd think would get approved are jukebox, quixotic, and gimmickry.