Spelling Be Like …

Since last week I posted about Wordle, I figured this week I would post about another word game I play, Spelling Bee. For those who are unfamiliar with it, Spelling Bee gives you seven letters, and you have to make as many words as you can out of them. Oh, and the words always have to include the letter in the middle. However, there are a few quirks:

• The list of words doesn’t include every word you could possibly make with those seven letters; the list is “curated” to exclude some less common or more specialized words. This may seem arbitrary, but after playing it for a while, you kind of know what words aren’t going to be there*. At one point I found a web site with a Spelling Bee clone that does include every possible word for the seven letters, and man, that’s too many words.**
• They never give you the letter “S”, because then you would be able to make a bajillion plurals. This restriction has never made sense to me, because they freely include “E” and “D” together, which allows you to make a bajillion past-tense verbs, as well as “I”, “N”, and “G”, which opens the door to present participles (and at least once they included all five of those letters, which let me tell you was a fiesta of conjugation), as well as “L” and “Y” so that you can happily create adverbs, although, as you’ll see, they treat adverbs a little fussily. RANT Just give us an “S” and exclude plurals! It wouldn’t be that hard! /RANT

Anyway, that’s all just background. The real purpose of this post is that it’s fun to use Spelling Bee to spell words that don’t exist, for instance:

Okay okay okay, sure, maybe not those first two, but how can you get by in the world without being able to call people potatohead?

And then there’s this. I mean, really, shouldn’t this one be in there?

Ah well. Despite the limitations, it’s still still groovy.

* To make things more challenging, I typically set myself a goal of trying not to guess any words that were not incuded in the list until I get to “Genius” level, and then I cut loose.
** Some days, after completing the puzzle, I like to visit the comments to see which missing word(s) people are complaining about; it’s often possible to guess what they will be. Depending on the word, the comment wars can be pretty popcorn-worthy.
*** No relation.