[HN Gopher] What are the "worst" spelling bee pangrams?
___________________________________________________________________
What are the "worst" spelling bee pangrams?
Author : tptacek
Score : 66 points
Date : 2024-03-16 02:16 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (notes.billmill.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (notes.billmill.org)
| spyspy wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| llimllib wrote:
| Thanks 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/ , 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...
|
| 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
|
| 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 wrote:
| They'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 wrote:
| I 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.
| tptacek wrote:
| So you need a 10-letter pangram that generates like 19 4-letter
| words. :)
| ddejohn wrote:
| Very 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.
| gomox wrote:
| I still remember my disappointment when I entered HEMOPHAGE
| and it was deemed "not a valid word".
| robsh wrote:
| Agreed. When I type a good word that isn't accepted, I
| usually just stop playing that days puzzle. My guess is that
| Sam is not very scientifically literate. Simple weather words
| like cyclonic or adiabatic, advection, no dice. And then you
| get some pretty obscure literary words.
|
| Makes me want to make a free clone that includes science
| words, and isn't afraid of the letter S.
| arijun wrote:
| What does "isn't afraid of the letter S" mean?
| spyspy wrote:
| spelling bee puzzles never contain S. Originally they
| didn't include puzzles with e+d or i+n+g either.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| It is also very culturally biased; some loanwords are more
| present than others
| dhc02 wrote:
| The omissions that kill me are common nautical terms.
| lozenge wrote:
| It feels like they could just use something like the Google
| Ngram viewer to filter the words.
| banana_giraffe wrote:
| That 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 wrote:
| Toot, trot, tort, and moot aren't legal?
| ajkjk wrote:
| You have to use the center letter, whatever it was.
| ztravis wrote:
| From the list of words, I think F was the required
| (central) letter.
| banana_giraffe wrote:
| As 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 wrote:
| Very 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
| JadeNB wrote:
| > 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!
| spyspy wrote:
| Maybe it was 2. It's been a while..
| tzs wrote:
| Is it the same dictionary Letter Boxed uses?
| schoen wrote:
| Definitely not! I play both and Letter Boxed accepts _many_
| more words.
| dehrmann wrote:
| > 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.
| karagenit wrote:
| Very neat. Would it be more efficient to start with every known
| pangram (~35k) and calculate the score from there instead of
| scoring every possible set of 7 letters (~8B) and then filtering
| for pangrams?
| llimllib wrote:
| The problem is that if you do that, you have to test every word
| (~42k) against every pangram (~16k) to see if it's a subset.
|
| I just wrote two quick test programs to find the score of the
| set of words for every pangrams, and my approach takes 6s vs
| 15s for your proposed approach:
| https://gist.github.com/llimllib/cc01daa8be8ced13ddeb6c76cf1...
| basil-rash wrote:
| > Every day's puzzle is guaranteed to have at least one pangram.
|
| I'm almost certain that wasn't true for at least one puzzle early
| this year, but haven't been able to come up with an exact date.
| chockablock wrote:
| Official rules say otherwise: "Each puzzle includes at least
| one "pangram," which uses every letter."
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/puzzles/spelling-bee -> click on 'How
| to Play'
| tptacek wrote:
| I've always assumed they generate the puzzle starting from a
| pangram.
| ddejohn wrote:
| This is the assumption I started with when I started
| building my clone.
| spyspy wrote:
| That's exactly how it works. The script scanned the
| dictionary for pangrams and then built the puzzles from
| that list, filtering out pangrams that didn't meet the
| other rules for the game.
| banana_giraffe wrote:
| The 2140 or so puzzles I've grabbed over the years all have at
| least one panagram.
|
| > 1: 1642, 2: 364, 3: 90, 4: 24, 7: 2, 5: 12, 6: 5, 8: 1
|
| That 8 panagram day was December 16, 2021
| JadeNB wrote:
| https://nytbee.com/ is an excellent source for historical data,
| if you'd like to try to track it down.
| hlfshell wrote:
| I love when people get fascinated by a puzzle and deep dive into
| it like this. Great article.
|
| Similarly I was fascinated by LetterBoxed, another NYT game and
| took a crack at a solver. https://hlfshell.ai/posts/letter-
| puzzles/
| philshem wrote:
| Here is a TUI player and solver that maybe is of interest:
|
| https://github.com/philshem/open-spelling-bee
| jeffbee wrote:
| It is certainly possible on some days to hit the "Solid" score,
| which is the terminal rank for free users, with only a pangram.
| kjhcvkek77 wrote:
| Am I missing something or does this not take the center-letter
| rule into account?
| waiwai933 wrote:
| Part 2 does
| jjcm wrote:
| Ironic that `equivoke`, defined as a word or phrase that has
| multiple meanings, is the word that when shuffled has the fewest
| meanings.
| nlawalker wrote:
| Related aside: if you like Spelling Bee, try NYT's new game
| Strands: https://www.nytimes.com/games/strands
|
| It's in beta right now and so I believe is accessible to
| everyone. Make sure to read the instructions.
|
| I love puzzles but for some reason I've never been into
| word/dictionary games (Spelling Bee; Boggle; Scrabble) but since
| hearing about Strands via
| https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/03/stran...
| I've played every day.
| frereubu wrote:
| Thanks for this. Funny that it's not on my Games page (I'm an
| NYT Games subscriber) unlike, I think, Connections, which was
| shown on that page with a "beta" flag.
| macintux wrote:
| As an aside, I've been frustrated at some of the game list's
| omissions.
|
| When "ullage" was not in the list, but a week or two later
| "doggo" was, I considered giving up.
|
| Fun game, but frustrating and annoying at times.
| gwern wrote:
| The double-backlink at the bottom is amusing - I recognize this
| bug from painful experience. OP counted each of the 2 links in
| the other article as a backlink, and didn't deduplicate. But...
| if you deduplicate, then you are unable to do _true_
| bidirectional backlinks to the original caller. You can 't figure
| out 'which' link in the other article is meant.
|
| You need HTML IDs set on each, but they have to be _different_
| ID-anchors (obviously, and also because it 'd be bad/invalid HTML
| to have duplicate IDs). So you actually need to track not just
| the other article but the ID inside the other article, and a way
| to generate those link IDs to begin with (since you definitely
| don't want to do it by hand). Gets tricky.
| im3w1l wrote:
| Wrote this which runs basically instantly
| https://pastebin.com/ax4eTKMr I hope I didn't make some
| embarassing mistake, but it seems to match the results of the
| code in part 2.
| nkurz wrote:
| For those wondering about the word "quooke", which is listed at
| the bottom as one of the 6 official solutions, it is the
| "(obsolete, nonce word) simple past and past participle of
| quake": https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/quooke
|
| Spenser coined it to use in the Faerie Queene in 1590:
|
| _His horses backe, yet to and fro long shooke,_
|
| _And tottred like two towres, which through a tempest quooke_
|
| I confess that it's hard for me to get excited about solving
| puzzles to find obsolete nonce words.
| llimllib wrote:
| quooke is a valid scrabble word that is almost certainly not
| valid for the spelling bee, however I don't have a very good
| spelling bee word list.
|
| So you might still be interested in the spelling bee, they
| mostly don't allow words like that.
|
| (And thanks for the eytmology!)
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-03-17 23:00 UTC)