Category: Columns

With the New York Times based on the East Coast, it looks like the publishers want players to have the Spelling Bee ready for the dictionary wizards first in the morning, so the Spelling Bee is almost always published at 3 a.m. Eastern time. Since most people are already asleep when the new spelling bee …

I think of playing Spelling Bee as sort of like running. There are lots of distances you can try to achieve. “Genius” level is what some would say is winning, which in my mind, is like running a marathon. Sometimes, it’s taken me more time to get to Genius than to run an actual marathon. …

No, you will have to subscribe, but it’s worth it. Here’s why. You can check out New York Times Spelling Bee anytime without a New York Times account. Go ahead, click, and check out today’s puzzle. You can even enter a few words. However, once you get a few more words you are given the …

There always is a pangram in the New York Times Spelling Bee. The distinguishing moment of any NYT Spelling Bee is when the player has that A-ha! moment and sees how the seven letters will unite to form one word. Finding the pangram is like that moment in The Matrix when Neo can see everything …

The New York Times Spelling Bee has a pretty simple scoring system. At a minimum, a word must have at least four letters. Four letters will get you one point. With Genius level sometimes being over 200, you’ll never get there only with four-letter words. Starting with five-letter words, players receive one point per letter. …

If you’ve played a lot of Scrabble, you are familiar with the concept of a bingo, which is when you use all of your tiles. On the New York Times Spelling Bee, when you find a word that uses all seven of the available letters, that’s called a Pangram. When you have a Spelling Bee …

One of the first unfamiliar things you might come across when you begin playing Spelling Bee is the Pangram. A pangram in normal use is when a sentence uses every letter of the alphabet. The most famous one in English is probably, “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” However, the New York …