The Spelling Bee has my brain abuzz
It's addictive, challenging and a welcome distraction in an election year
The New York Times brings us a steady diet of war, natural disaster, disease, famine, pestilence and — perhaps most alarming of all — presidential election news.
But, mercifully, it also brings us the Spelling Bee (subscription required), my current favorite escape from reality.
The game on the Times website has a simple premise: Six letters are arranged in a ring, with a seventh in the center. The challenge is to create as many words as possible, using that seventh letter and any — or all — of the others.
The September 30 lineup offered X, D, E, I, O, N, with M as the must-have seventh letter. So, for example, I could make DEMON or DENIM but not INDEX because it lacks the mandatory M. Repeat letters are allowed, so I could — and did — make MEME, MIME, DOMINO and DOMINION.
I’m coming late to this word party — the Bee has a cult following that goes back years. Why do I find it so addictive?
For starters, the words have to be at least four-letters long. That eliminates the Scrabble problem of rewarding players for knowing extremely short, extremely obscure words, like AI (a species of three-toed sloth), OE (a whirlwind that occurs off the Faroe Islands) and XU (a Vietnamese monetary unit). (Thanks, Word Genius, for the list.) I don’t want to have to memorize a bunch of obscure words to successfully play a game.
I also like the feedback the game provides. As you find more and more words, the Times goes from calling you Good to Solid to Amazing to Genius to the highest category — Queen Bee. To reach that pinnacle you have to exhaust the entire Times list of acceptable words for that day’s letter. I can occasionally do that but only by taking advantage of the Hints page, which offers such clues as how many words starting with, say, AT are left to find.
The more I play, the more I find that words will sometimes just jump out of the mists. A few days ago, after a period of frustration, I walked away from the game, only to have INTIMIDATING pop into my head. Long words win the most points, so that was a satisfying development.
The game reminds me of a crossword puzzle in at least one way: Some words tend to appear again and again. I’m not sure I’ve ever written or spoken the word VIVIFYING (to enliven) in my life, but it’s cropped up at least twice in recent days. NAAN, the yummy bread from India, also makes regular appearances.
Playing the game has also taught me just how successful drug commercials are at implanting product names in our heads. The Bee doesn’t allow brand names, but words like DUPIXENT and ABILIFY are constantly jumping out at me. One morning, I wasted a couple of minutes of Bee time trying alternate spellings of ALIEVE, a word that actually does not exist. I was confusing it with ALEVE, the drug brand name. But that did finally lead me to the actual word I was looking for: ALLEVIATE.
Tonight, Tim Walz (whose name contains the letters in WALTZ, as in a graceful dance) debates JD Vance (whose name contains the letters in CAVED, as in selling your soul to Donald Trump). I’ll be half listening to the vice presidential candidates debate and half trying to think of words I can make from today’s Bee lineup of C,T,V,L,E,O and the mandatory I. If things can too far down the TOILET during the debate, I’ll switch over to the Bee exclusively.
Yes, I’m hoping for a CIVIL debate but expecting a lot of VILE rhetoric. So it should be a good night for Bee play, if not democracy.