![]() "When I got good and thoroughly stuck, I wanted a way to figure out the answers I was missing, just so I would stop obsessing over it," he told me. Writer and programmer William Shunn, who lives in New York City, created the Spelling Bee Solver in September 2018, soon after he discovered and got hooked on the Bee. Other players have found ingenious ways to build on the Bee and help fellow players. Recently she created March Madness–style brackets for words that aren't accepted in the Bee but maybe ought to be - words like COIR (a fiber made from coconut husks), ALEE (toward shelter), and TAMARI (Japanese soy sauce). has usually found all the words and posted her results on Twitter. ![]() Eastern, when the new Bee is posted, and by 4 a.m. The undisputed Queen Bee queen is Deb Koker, an engineer and lawyer in Bedford, Massachusetts, who rises every morning at 3 a.m. How many is all? That's kept secret, but the total point value is approximately double the Amazing level. There's a hidden prize, Queen Bee, for finding all the words in a hive achieve it and Beeatrice appears wearing a crown. Are there productive letter combinations, such as UN, ING, or ED, that can be used to create multiple words? Do you remember that -ULE is a suffix meaning "small," as in VENULE, a small vein? Does an abundance of vowels suggest foreign-language imports such as AIOLI and LUAU? Solvers find satisfaction in tracking their progress in each day's game, beginning with "Good Start" and proceeding through "Nice" and "Amazing." "Genius"level is rewarded with a bee icon - she has a name: Beeatrice - wearing a mortarboard.īut wait - you can keep playing on beyond Genius. The Bee is both a vocabulary game and a pattern-finding challenge in the latter respect, it resembles Scrabble. The rankings for the March 4, 2021, puzzle shown above. ![]() Proper nouns and words deemed offensive are not allowed, and you'll never find an S in the hive - easy pluralization would give the game away. ( Pangram comes from roots meaning "all" and "letter.") Each four-letter word earns a single point the point value of longer words is equal to their length - a six-letter word is worth six points - and each pangram earns a seven-point bonus. Letters may be repeated, and at least one word - the pangram - contains all seven letters. ![]() The challenge: to construct as many words as possible from the "hive." The rules: words must be at least four letters long (in the newspaper version, the minimum length is five letters) and must contain the central letter. The seven-letter Bee is constructed each day by veteran puzzlemaker Frank Longo from a computer-generated list based on the latest Scrabble word list. I have no financial stake in the Times or the Bee, so my endorsement is unbiased: the subscription's modest cost is worth it. Spelling bee was first documented in 1809.)Ĭan you find all 58 words - worth 237 points - in the March 4 puzzle?Īnyone can play the Bee, but to chart your progress you'll need a New York Times Games subscription, which also gives you access to the crossword and other online puzzles. (The bee in spelling bee has been used metaphorically since the 1530s to mean "busy worker" the sense of "a meeting of neighbors to labor together," as in a quilting bee, is American English dating back to 1769. In both varieties, six letters surround a central letter in a hexagonal "beehive" shape. The Times Bee comes in two flavors: a pen-and-paper puzzle in the Sunday Magazine, introduced in 2014 and an online game, launched in May 2018, that's refreshed daily. This isn't the spelling bee you may be picturing, in which contestants (usually schoolkids) stand up, one at a time, and attempt to spell difficult words. For some of us who proudly identify as word nerds, the preferred pastime has been a clever and challenging puzzle that can be enjoyed either in solitude or on social media: the New York Times Spelling Bee. During this year of COVID restrictions, many people have taken up new hobbies that don't require in-person socializing: birding, sewing, sourdough-bread baking.
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