LearnedLeague One-Day Special Recap: NYT Spelling Bee Vocabulary
Our first offseason guest post comes from David Goldfarb, who is buzzing with NYT Spelling Bee knowledge.
New this LL offseason: I am now accepting reader submissions for ML match day or 1DS recaps! If you are interested, email me at braphel@gmail.com or comment on this thread.
We’re starting this offseason with a post from David Goldfarb (GoldfarbDavidJ on LL) about the NYT Spelling Bee Vocab quiz from earlier this week. Check out David’s recap below!
Q1: A Spelling Bee player often starts out looking for pangrams, which are words that contain all seven available letters. Depending on the available pangrams, finding all the words may require scoring over 500 points, or as few as 50. What unique pangram was used in the lowest scoring spelling bee?
(L) A B K R U W
This seems like a nice straightforward start. I spend a little time trying to come up with compounds involving WALL or WAR, and wishing I had the actual online Bee interface where I can scramble the letters around with a single keypress. I start toying with the idea of writing the letters down in a hex arrangement, but before I can do anything about it my brain manages to unscramble BULWARK.
MONEY?: No. This is a straightforward scrambled-word puzzle, where you don't even have to use any of the letters more than once.
Q2: These two types of trees always appear together in the Bee. One is an African tree that is the traditional source of gum arabic; the other is a South American palm whose berries are marketed as a health food. Name both.
(C) A I M O T X
Easy one: two types of trees? That's gotta be ACAI and ACACIA right there, a pair I've found many many times before. Berries? CAI in the list of letters? Yep.
MONEY?: No, just too easy.
Q3: While a "little" agreement of this type was made between Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia between World Wars, the best known one is almost certainly the early 20th century understanding among the United Kingdom, France, and Russia.
(N) E H L M O T
I have to leave and come back to this one several times. TREATY is missing several letters, and what's a "little" treaty anyway? What other kind of agreement could there be? I actually come close to leaving this one blank, but then I look at it while trying to think about "Bee-words" and ENTENTE comes to mind. That's one I always have trouble spotting in the regular game, too.
MONEY?: Yes. I don't think ENTENTE is a well-known word. (Wrong: here I badly underestimate the level of LLama historical knowledge and the fame of the entente cordiale.)
Q4: Television producer Michael Schur maintained a Twitter thread where he reported whether or not he remembered this word when it appeared in Spelling Bee. On the "short scale," it denotes a value that is approximately equal to half of the sun's mass in kilograms. On the "long scale," it denotes a value that is 24 orders of magnitude larger.
(L) B G I N O W
What's a word for the sun's mass? I think for a while and then I notice the "in kilograms", indicating that this is just a number-word. Not long after that I spot that the letters contain LION, and I've long since got it by heart that when there's LION there is also NONILLION. Could the sun's mass be two nonillion kilograms? I don't know for sure, but it sounds at least plausible. Oh yes, and the "long scale" then must be the one where "one billion" is 10^12 instead of 10^9, and each successive "-illion" is a factor of a million instead of a thousand. I don't actually bother double-checking that the difference there would indeed be 10^24: I'm already sure enough that NONILLION is right.
(In the recap, the smith noted that he deliberately threw in a G in order to throw some people on to GOOGOL. I didn't spot that, but I wouldn't have put it even if I had: a googol is 10^100, which is way too large for the sun's mass in kilograms.)
MONEY?: Absolutely. This is an obscure word, one that only the hardcore Bee players are likely to get. (Right. This was optimal money, and in fact the hardest single question.)
Q5: Antoine Watteau and François Boucher are among the best-known practitioners of what style, which developed as a reaction to the more formal Louis XIV style?
(O) C F I M R U
Quick one: "style" probably means art, and I can see the OCR that make up ROCOCO.
MONEY?: No. This seems like a reasonably easy get, and there's even been LL questions about rococo art in the recent past.
Q6: What musical form, with a name derived from Italian for "touch", is commonly written for keyboard instruments and contains fast passages that show off the performer's dexterity? A particularly famous one in D minor is paired with a fugue.
(O) A C E H L T
Another quick one: "Toccata and Fugue in D Minor" is really a bit of a nerf. Just gotta double-check that I have the right number of c's and t's.
MONEY?: Again, no.
Q7: On rare occasions, a word is added to the Spelling Bee word list after previously having been ruled too obscure. One such word is what six-letter term for a Jewish prayer shawl, characterized by the fringes on its corners known as tzitzit?
(L) A D I P T U
A Jewish prayer shawl. Is this TEFILLIN? No, there's no F or N. Oh yes, TALLIT. Thank you, Rabbi Small mysteries.
MONEY?: Yes. LLamas in general don't tend to be experts on Judaica, and this is decidedly YEKIOYD. (Correct, optimal money.)
Q8: Conversely -- and a little more frequently -- a word is sometimes removed from Spelling Bee for being too obscure. One such word is what noun, which Merriam-Webster defines as "a series of miseries or disastrous events" or "a series of exploits regarded as suitable for an epic"? Although it is obscure as a common noun, it is far better known as a proper noun.
(L) A B C D I O
Hmm. "A series of miseries"? Not ringing any bells in the Bee words. Hang on — "epic". ILIAD. Yeah, I remember that used to be a word and then it got taken off the list. We'll go with that.
MONEY?: Yes. This is extremely obscure as a common noun, and I think ILIAD is going to be hard to land on if you don't know it as a Bee word. (Correct.)
Q9: Merriam-Webster also dates the first attested use of what word to 1888, in the sense of an ornamental attachment or decoration? The word is also used to refer to items whose name or use is forgotten.
(D) A J N O R U
I spend some time puzzling over this and trying to figure out words for "ornamental attachment". When I try to come at it from the angle of "forgotten name or use" I manage to land on DOODAD.
MONEY?: Yes. I think this is another one hard to get just from the clue if you don't do the Bee regularly. (Again correct.)
Q10: What plant was called "probably the most useful tree of all" by botanist Michael Adanson, the namesake of its genus? A different view of this plant was expounded by The Little Prince, who explained that this type of plant needs to be pulled up as quickly and as frequently as possible.
(A) B C L N O Y
I readily remember that "The Little Prince" warned of the danger of baobab trees.
MONEY?: No. "The Little Prince" is a beloved classic, and there's even a science in for a few people. (Well, if I thought more people had read "The Little Prince" than remembered the entente cordiale, I was dead wrong. But, not optimal money, by a few percentage points.)
Q11: One of the best known mythological instances of what act is described in Norse mythology and involves Baldr, Höðr, a devious trick from Loki, and a sprig of mistletoe? This act was also a frequent climactic event in several fantasy novel series by David & Leigh Eddings, having been performed by Belgarion (once) and Sparhawk (twice).
(I) C D E F N O
A finalist in the Mythology mini-league, of course I know that the mistletoe led to Baldr's death. And DEICIDE is on my list of Bee words. One of the easy ones.
MONEY?: No. We just had a Mythology mini-league, right? And maybe some people have read Eddings. (Whom I liked greatly as a teenager, but then soured on when he got repetitive...viz. the three deicides.) (Again, not quite optimal money, but better than ENTENTE.)
Q12: The New York Post, ever eager to report on strife at the Times, reported that the NYT newsroom was "rocked" when what adjective was omitted from the word list for a puzzle in October 2021? Succession actor J. Smith-Cameron publicly protested this word's absence -- a word that describes characters (like Succession's Logan Roy) who show resolve in the face of difficulty.
(A) D E N T U X
That date is well after I started playing the Bee daily, but I don't remember the word off the top of my head. The UN in there makes me think of that time UNINDICTED was in the grid but not the word list, but of course there's no I or C in this letter list. Well, think: what's a word for someone who shows resolve? Eventually I land on UNDAUNTED.
MONEY?: No. This is gettable for non-Bee players. (Wrong! This one was optimal money. I overestimated how gettable it was if you're not used to being able to reuse letters.)
Overall: 12/12, excellent, only my 6th 12/12 on a 1DS in 9 off-seasons. I wish I'd guessed the money better, but that's the way the cookie crumbles. And 9th place out of more than 1300 players is nothing to sneeze at.