Word Games
You Can’t Spell “Preventable” Without a Bee
Sometimes life (or a diabolical puzzle editor) throws you a curve you know is coming, and it still beans you in the brainpan. Bee alert!
The New York Times Spelling Bee is a daily online puzzle that presents a set of seven letters and challenges players to construct as many words as possible using them. There’s always at least one word — the “pangram” — that uses all seven letters. One letter is designated as the “center,” and that letter must appear in all the solutions.
I starting playing the Spelling Bee in the fall of 2018, and I quickly became fascinated with it. Before long I’d started building a little web tool to help me find solutions to the puzzle when I got stuck. All this was in service to my quest to achieve “Queen Bee” status — meaning that you have found every answer that the Times deems acceptable.
Because that’s the other thing about the Bee — each day’s puzzle comes with a definitive list of acceptable answers. For some people, part of the fun and frustration of the Bee is arguing online about words that weren’t accepted in the puzzle but should have been, or that were accepted and shouldn’t have been. You’ll find endless examples of this exercise in the comments…
