On that day of infamy, Aug, the Spelling Bee editors for the first time repeated a previous puzzle using the exact same center letter as before. Because early one morning in 2020, my nightmare scenario came true. But I knew it would also take time and hard effort, so I kept putting it off. In the back of my mind I knew I needed to shore things up against that eventuality. I wasn’t sure my solver would know the right way to handle this situation. There was one problem in particular that I knew might crop up one day but had not yet - what would happen if the editors ever decided to repeat one specific puzzle, hive, center letter and all. Enough people use it that I’m fanatical about correcting any problems as soon as humanly possible. Gradually other players found it, and it now attracts more users to my site than even my manuscript formatting guide. Over time I kept tinkering with my solver, adding new features, automating others, and generally sprucing up the layout. “ Windflaw ” is a real word, but it won’t earn you any points in the New York Times Spelling Bee. The pangram will be the same as before, but the differing center letter means there will still be some new words to find in the solution set. What keeps this from being too repetitive is that the designated center letter will be different. Sometimes other words, which may have been deemed too obscure or unintentionally offensive, will make the reverse migration to the blacklist.Īnother thing the editors do with some frequency is to repeat a set of seven letters (or “hive”) after it has already appeared in the Bee. Sometimes a word that the editors once deemed unacceptable, such as “ annal ,” will suddenly end up whitelisted after much lobbying from the Bee community.

You’ll find endless examples of this exercise in the comments section of the Times Wordplay blog, or under the #spellingbee hashtag on Twitter. 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. Because that’s the other thing about the Bee - each day’s puzzle comes with a definitive list of acceptable answers.

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