New York Times Spelling Bee

Frustrating Like This Bee Can Be

Scientific American

The New York Times has this daily puzzle called the Spelling Bee. To play, you must use the center letter of a 6-letter hexagon to create 4-letter or longer words. It resembles a flower, or a piece of honeycomb.

The following rules on how to BEE good, take straight from the puzzle:

• Words must contain at least 4 letters.

• Words must include the center letter.

• Our word list does not include words that are obscure, hyphenated, or proper nouns.

• No cussing either, sorry.

• Letters can be used more than once.

Score points to increase your rating:

• 4-letter words are worth 1 point each.

• Longer words earn 1 point per letter.

• Each puzzle includes at least one “panagram” which uses every letter. These are worth 7 extra points!

Now, I do enjoy this puzzle. It just frustrates me when I play words like:

• Diode

• Odeon

• Tontine

give me an AWESOME message, but when I try:

• Alogical

• Boolean

• Maca

render a Not in Word List message.

I mean, come ON!

You can buy this at grocery stores, online. It's available. It's more commonly known, one would think, than ODEON.

Anyway, when I wrote my first email to

buzzwords@nytimes.com I received a long, automated reply from 'Buzzby, Beeatrice': "While proper names and words that contain hyphens or apostrophes are not part of our word list, every Spelling Bee puzzle is hand-curated to focus on relatively common words, with a couple of tough ones here and there to keep it challenging. In fairness to our wide-ranging audience, Spelling Bee generally avoids terms that are hyper-specific to any professional field, such as terms that might be familiar to, say, a physician or geologist, but not people outside of that area of expertise."

WTF?

Message Beeatrice again and all you get is the gentle buzz of . . . .

#NYTimesWordplay