What are the "worst" spelling bee pangrams?

https://notes.billmill.org/blog/2024/03/What_are_the__worst__spelling_bee_pangrams_.html

by tptacek • 2 years ago

104 85 2 years ago

notes.billmill.org

spyspy6• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

angiosperm6• 2 years ago

To share remotely, one player gets halfway to genius, pangram forbidden, and the second player gets over the line. After that you use SB Buddy (no peeking at hints) to get to Queeen Bee.

The most annoying missing wordlist words are naphtha and caracal. An objective measure of word-use frequency should determine the words included. Probably super-obscure articles of clerical costume should not be.

llimllib4• 2 years ago

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

spyspy6• 2 years ago

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.

dmurray3• 2 years ago

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.

tptacek2• 2 years ago

So you need a 10-letter pangram that generates like 19 4-letter words. :)

ddejohn2• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

I still remember my disappointment when I entered HEMOPHAGE and it was deemed "not a valid word".

robsh• 2 years ago

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.

dsjoerg• 2 years ago

Agreed, I get frustrated a few days a week with curation inclusions and exclusions. DOORYARD, MICROMINI, NONCOM, ROMCOM are in the list and IMO shouldn't be. UNTENDED, MONOTONIC, BOLE are not in the list but IMO deserve to be.

banana_giraffe3• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

Toot, trot, tort, and moot aren't legal?

spyspy6• 2 years ago

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

tzs• 2 years ago

Is it the same dictionary Letter Boxed uses?

schoen• 2 years ago

Definitely not! I play both and Letter Boxed accepts many more words.

dehrmann• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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?

llimllib4• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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'

tptacek2• 2 years ago

I've always assumed they generate the puzzle starting from a pangram.

banana_giraffe3• 2 years ago

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

JadeNB2• 2 years ago

https://nytbee.com/ is an excellent source for historical data, if you'd like to try to track it down.

hlfshell2• 2 years ago

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/

tkgally4• 2 years ago

I’m a fan of LetterBoxed, too.

The NYT’s solutions are always two words, which I rarely get on my own. But once, a couple of years ago, I discovered a one-word solution to one day’s puzzle: LEXICOGRAPHY. Very elegant, I thought to myself smugly.

I happened to remember that solution a couple of months ago, and I decided to see if I could find others. I am not a programmer, but by asking ChatGPT 4 for help I was able to create a Python program and run it in Google Colab using a large list of English words that I had compiled from various online word lists.

Here is the beginning of the resulting list of one-word solutions to LetterBoxed:

acetylcholinesterase [a c e] [h i l] [n o r] [s t y]

acetylcholinesterases [a c e] [h i l] [n o r] [s t y]

achondroplastic [a c d] [h i l] [n o p] [r s t]

acknowledgement [a c d] [e g k] [l m n] [o t w]

acknowledgment [a c d] [e g k] [l m n] [o t w]

The code that ChatGPT 4 wrote for me and the full list of solutions are here:

https://gally.net/temp/20240318onewordsolutionstoletterboxed...

tkgally4• 2 years ago

Whoops. Looking through that list of words again, I see that some of the puzzle configurations could not yield those solutions, because adjacent letters in the solution are in the same triplet. The configuration for acknowledgment, for example, has a and c in the same triplet, which is not possible in LetterBox. My bad. I’ll take a look at the code again later.

angiosperm6• 2 years ago

I have a short program to solve letterboxed. I can't measure how fast it is.

  #include <array>
  #include <algorithm>
  #include <bitset>
  #include <iostream>
  #include <string_view>
  #include <vector>
  #include <unistd.h>
  #include <sys/mman.h>
  #include <sys/types.h>
  #include <sys/stat.h>
  #include <fcntl.h>
  
  struct Word {
    using Bits = std::bitset<32>; // A bit for each a..z, plus an "error" bit at index 26.
    using Rules = std::array<Bits, 27>; // Map from letter indices to forbidden letters (plus a spare).
  
    std::string_view str;
    Bits bits;
  
    static unsigned ix(char c) { return c - 'a'; };  // 'a'..'z' -> 0..25; others -> >25
    bool ok() const { return !bits.test(26) && str.size() > 1; }
    explicit Word(std::string_view s, Bits accept = {0x3ffffff}, Rules const& rules = {}) : str(s) {
      for (unsigned i = 0, prev_ix = 26, bit_ix = 0; i != str.size(); prev_ix = bit_ix, ++i) {
        bit_ix = std::min(ix(str[i]), 26u);
        if (accept.test(bit_ix) && !rules.at(prev_ix).test(bit_ix)) { bits.set(bit_ix); }
        else { bits.set(26); return; }}}
  };
  
  int main(int ac, char** av) {
    auto usage = [av](){ std::cerr << "usage: " << av[0] << " abcdefghijkl [<wordlist>]\n"; };
    if (ac != 2 && ac != 3) { return usage(), 1; }
    char const* const  name = (ac == 3) ? av[2] : "/usr/share/dict/american-english-large";
    const int fd = ::open(name , O_RDONLY);
    if (fd < 0) { return std::cerr << av[0] << ": failed to open " << name  << '\n', 3; }
    const std::size_t file_size = ::lseek(fd, 0, SEEK_END);
    void const* const addr = ::mmap(nullptr, file_size, PROT_READ, MAP_SHARED, fd, 0);
    if (addr == MAP_FAILED) { return std::cerr << av[0] << ": failed to open " << name  << '\n', 3; }
  
    const auto  target = Word{av[1]};
    if (target.bits.test(26) || target.str.size() != 12 || target.bits.count() != 12)
      { return usage(), 3; }
  
    const auto rules = [w=target.str, ix=Word::ix](Word::Rules rules = {}) {
      for (int i = 0; i < 12; i += 3)
        rules.at(ix(w[i])) = rules.at(ix(w[i+1])) = rules.at(ix(w[i+2])) = Word(w.substr(i, 3)).bits;
      return rules;
    }();
  
    const auto  candidates = [&](std::array<std::vector<Word>, 26> candidates = {}) {
      for (std::string_view  in = {static_cast<char const*>(addr), file_size}; !in.empty();) {
        const Word word{in.substr(0, in.find('\n')), target.bits, rules};
        if (word.ok()) { candidates.at(Word::ix(word.str.front())).push_back(word); }
        in = in.substr(word.str.size() + 1);  // Skip past '\n' if present (might not be, at EOF).
      }
      return candidates;
    }();
  
    for (auto const& firsts : candidates) {
      for (const auto first : firsts) {
        for (const auto second : candidates.at(Word::ix(first.str.back()))) {
          if ((first.bits | second.bits) == target.bits) {
            std::cout << first.str << ' ' << second.str << '\n'; }}}}
  }

philshem• 2 years ago

Here is a TUI player and solver that maybe is of interest:

https://github.com/philshem/open-spelling-bee

angiosperm6• 2 years ago

The one-liner to solve that SB is

  grep -v '[^victmze]' /usr/share/dict/words |
    grep .... | grep e

A very short program to generate all possible puzzles given a word list is at https://github.com/ncm/nytm-spelling-bee .

jeffbee• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

Am I missing something or does this not take the center-letter rule into account?

waiwai933• 2 years ago

Part 2 does

jjcm• 2 years ago

Ironic that `equivoke`, defined as a word or phrase that has multiple meanings, is the word that when shuffled has the fewest meanings.

nlawalker• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

Agingcoder• 2 years ago

Indeed that’s a very good game. Thanks.

macintux• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

algas• 2 years ago

Yup, here's the problem [0]:

  def calculate_backlinks(
      pages: Dict[str, Page], attachments: Dict[str, Attachment]
  ) -> None:
      for page in pages.values():
          for link in page.links:
              linked_page = find(pages, attachments, link)
              if not linked_page:
                  info(f"unable to find link", link, page.title)
                  continue
             
  linked_page.backlinks.append(page)

No deduplication performed. Since he's parsing the backlinks directly out of the markdown, you don't have to worry about a recursive loop where the backlinks section on one page appears as links in another. A simple solution would be to change the datatype of backlinks from list to set.

[0] From OP's static site generator: https://github.com/llimllib/obsidian_notes/blob/main/run.py

im3w1l• 2 years ago

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.

nkurz2• 2 years ago

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.

llimllib4• 2 years ago

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!)

Ylpertnodi• 2 years ago

"(obsolete, nonce word)"

Note: 'Nonce' is British slang for paedophile, though did you mean 'nonsense'?

chownie• 2 years ago

No, "nonce" meaning paedophile is very modern.

Until the 1970s nonce meant "appears only once" and referred to figures and terms which never found common use after being coined.

nkurz2• 2 years ago

No, as 'chownie' says, I was using it in it's original technical sense of a word that is created for the occasion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonce_word

Nonce is also used in cryptography for a number that is arbitrary and only used once: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptographic_nonce

angiosperm6• 2 years ago

The one-liner to solve that SB is

  grep -v '[^victmze]' /usr/share/dict/words |
    grep .... | grep e

A program to generate all possible NYTM SB puzzles is at https://github.com/ncm/nytm-spelling-bee . The alterations to match the online version are trivial. It runs in well under 100 ms on a modern CPU.

There are bigger dictionaries packaged, e.g. wamerican-huge.

mvkel• 2 years ago

Just came here to say: bill mill is an awesome human and I'm glad to see his work appreciated here!

What are the "worst" spelling bee pangrams?

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