Are You A NYT Spelling Bee Addict, Too?

Here are my 7 strategies for nailing Queen Bee status on the regular.

At some point during the pandemic, desperate for amusement of any kind, I turned to word puzzles. Did I know that feverishly doing crosswords was only one rung down from crocheting tea cozies and watching murder mysteries?

Yes. But I was a desperate woman.

After exhausting once again the entire seven-season Buffy oeuvre, plowing through Firefly for the fifth time, gritting my teeth during the creepy sexual assault subplots of Veronica Mars and reciting all the dialogue of both seasons of Party Down (you have no idea how much I love that show), it was only one lateral move to word puzzles.

How was I supposed to know how addictive they were?

Admittedly, The New York Times crosswords were the best, although by Thursday’s puzzle, I was already irritated. They get increasingly difficult as the week goes on. Monday’s is the easiest, Saturday’s the hardest, and Sunday’s is a marathon of patient endurance that I simply do not possess. It’s not that the words necessarily get harder. It’s that the clues get trickier, and the trickier they get, the more annoyed I become.

That was when I discovered the Spelling Bee.

Right away, I knew I’d found something challenging, something that required skill instead of luck. The Bee works like this: in a honeycomb-shaped puzzle, there are six letters and then a seventh “control” letter in the center. All words must contain this control letter.

Puzzles look like this:

There are a few rules:

1. Words three letters or fewer are not accepted.

2. Individual letters can be used more than once.

3. Acceptable words do not include words that are hyphenated, a proper noun, or that qualify as “obscure,” except when they’re totally obscure, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

4. You will never see the letter S.

5. A pangram is when you use all seven letters or more. It also means extra points. There is at least one pangram per puzzle.

6. As you find words, you get showered with little compliments, such as “genius,” and “amazing.” I ignore all that noise because I’m an obsessed maniac who bears down on the Queen Bee like a racetrack greyhound chasing a mechanical rabbit.

7. There are various ranks of proficiency: Beginner, Good Start, Moving Up, Good, Solid, Nice, Great, Amazing, Genius, and then the ultimate, which is Queen Bee.
   Sam Ezersky, the twenty-something whiz kid who crafts this puzzle, doesn’t consider words like “nonagonal,” “longan,” “galangal,” “glia,” “partita,” “apparat,” or “irrupt” to be obscure. He is also prone to using terms out of organic chemistry textbooks, as well as wildly obscure religious vocabulary (at least to non-Jews). I forgive him because he’s both good-natured and a genius. At least once a week I send him a sternly worded email about a word he’s missed, likely making me the most obnoxious person he’s ever had to deal with. One time he missed the word “abattoir,” and on Twitter, we all went berserk. Seriously. There must have been 500 replies to his meek admission of guilt. He almost had to go into Witness Protection.

With nothing but time on my hands and the sugar rush from my millionth homemade loaf of cinnamon bread that I panic-baked in order to sustain me through the pandemic, I refused to budge from my chair until I’d made it to Genius. This says a lot about who I am, sadly. Sometimes it took two hours or more to get there. But no way was I going to be thwarted by a f@*!ing puzzle ginned up by a twenty-five year old. If I was going to die from some awful virus I couldn’t even see, I certainly wasn’t going to go down without scoring an entirely pointless victory over a puzzle. There are limits to how much human indignity a person is willing to suffer.

Every morning, I played the Bee. Every morning, I cursed Ezersky’s name. When I eventually emerged triumphant, John would roll his eyes at me. He was right to do it. Few things are more ridiculous than a grown woman talking smack about winning a game. But I’d tapped into a competitive streak I didn’t even know I had. At this point, I was mainlining the stuff.

My insufferable arrogance came to a halt one day when I learned that “Genius” wasn’t actually the highest level you could attain. In the early days of the Bee, Ezersky didn’t bother explicitly stating that there was a level higher than Genius, one that meant you’d found every word in the puzzle. It was called Queen Bee, and when you scored the Queen, you got the bumblebee icon with a tiny crown above her head.

With Genius, all you got was the Bee with a mortarboard.

Now, I wasn’t just obsessed; I was feral.

I’d been doing the Bee for about a year at this point. No sooner had I finished one puzzle than I was already sniffing around for another. I looked for Spelling Bee archives, but none existed, which is probably a good thing, at least for me. There is a Spelling Bee knockoff, but the words are too easy to be any fun, and the app is loaded with ads that make it glitchy and buggy, so I deleted it.

Hey, Bee knock-off developers! You suck.

After maybe 14 months or so, I finally made it all the way to Queen Bee. My God, you’d have thought I singlehandedly discovered the cure for Covid. I took a screengrab, just to preserve the moment for eternity, and crowed about it on Facebook. I was this close to getting a bob haircut, joining a Homeowners’ Association, and making baleful pronouncements on the quality of other people’s mailboxes. That’s what a global pandemic will do to you.

But my victory was short-lived. I had a hard time making it to Queen Bee again. A whole month went by with me frothing at the mouth. Then a friend told me about the Helpful Hints feature at the upper right of my screen, and from that point forward, I was rolling in puppies.

When you click on Helpful Hints, you get this:

Now, I wasn’t just poking around anymore. I knew exactly how many words of each letter I needed to find. It was a game-changing moment for me. Too bad it TOOK ME MORE THAN A YEAR to find out about it.

Still, you have to put in the hours before you get any good at the Bee. It’s like tennis. Sure, you can bat the ball across the net your first time out, but it takes practice, grit, and determination to get good enough to beat a Williams sister.

Yet, even before discovering the Helpful Hints grid, I’d cultivated a few strategies that I would like to share with you. They will help. A lot. Soon, you, too, will be sitting with your finger poised over the Spelling Bee app at 3 AM, Eastern, waiting for the new puzzle to drop.

#goals.

Tip 1:

Don’t just search for stems of words. Search for suffixes. Suffices are word endings, such as -ed, -ing, -tion, -able. Some puzzles have them; some puzzles don’t. The ones that don’t have obvious suffixes are a bitch. Ezersky likes to trot one or two of those puzzles out each week. When he’s feeling benevolent, he’ll give you a really fun, high-word-count puzzle with -ing or -ed, sometimes both in the same puzzle, and you feel almost giddy with joy.

Tip 2:

Go through your Found Words list and look for compound nouns. Compound nouns are made up of two or more existing words. The German language, for instance, is comprised of far too many compound nouns, which is why some German words—Kraftfahrzeug-Haftpflichtversicherung, for instance (it means motor vehicle liability insurance)—are so cumbersome. Ezersky likes to throw in a few compound nouns when he can, just so he can watch you tear your hair out by the roots. In the example puzzle above, he had “mudroom,” and “drumroll,” so be sure to look for missed compound nouns.

Tip 3:

Start making a list of “Ezersky words” now. The better you get at the Bee, the more often you’ll come across two or three ridiculous words that keep you from completing the puzzle. I gave you a few examples earlier. Here are a few more: “jinni,” “rani,” “baobab” (it’s some kind of demonic tree, I don’t know), “callaloo,” “algal,” “bacilli,” “laic.” These are all “Ezersky words.” Trust me, you do not want to mess with this guy. Because having a sizable vocabulary won’t save you. You need to know his words. It’s the only way you’re going to win. Every day, click on the link that says Yesterday and start writing down the words you need to know. Find a way to organize them on your phone. Then LEARN THEM.

Tip 4:

When you get stuck, do something else for a few minutes. This strategy works shockingly well for me. I do some work or read an article, and the minute I come back to the Spelling Bee, the word I’ve been looking for is staring me rudely in the face.

Tip 5:

It sometimes helps to first look for words that don’t include the control letter. They won’t count, of course, but looking around the control letter can often lead to seeing words you wouldn’t ordinarily see right away.

Tip 6:

Take s**t from no one. Okay, so you have a teensy little Spelling Bee addiction. Big deal. So do thousands of other enthusiasts who play the Bee like a maniacal roulette wheel every morning. In fact, they’re referred to as the hive mind, and if you look around, there are subreddits and Twitter feeds where other hive minders abound. Not that I would encourage you to join Twitter, of course. Twitter is evil.

Tip 7:

Tap the reshuffle button from time to time. It gives you fresh perspective, although I now find that I don’t need to do it as often as I used to.

NOTE: Another fan favorite, a puzzle called Wordle, which I also obsessively play, is free on The New York Times website. That’s as of this writing. People who don’t subscribe to any form of the paper, physical or digital, can play the Spelling Bee up to the rank of “Solid.” If you can stop there and be happy, I’d like to shake your hand. But chances are you’re every bit the nutjob I am, in which case you’ll have to fork over a few dollars every month to play. You’re welcome.

And there you have it: Keep playing. Save your Ezersky words. Look for suffixes. Don’t let anyone tell you we’re not at war. Of course we’re at war. And we’re going to win it.

Now, get out there and start solving the Bee!

Copyright © 2023 Stacey Eskelin

Are you a hive minder? Or are there other puzzles you enjoy? I want to hear all about it, so be sure to leave your comments in the comments section below.