Buzz words

The beekeeper in chief of the ‘New York Times’ Spelling Bee explains the method behind the seeming madness of his word list

Photo by James Wainscoat on Unsplash

Dan Lynn Watt, of Cambridge, Mass., writes: “My wife and I are addicted to The New York Times’s Spelling Bee. I wonder how it decides what does and doesn’t count as a legitimate word. For example, it allows cancan but not chacha, and neither yoyo nor tomtom. I stubbornly keep trying those, thinking surely they will have changed their minds by now. There are many other examples of inconsistencies. What do you think about this?

Dan, I know exactly what you mean about the apparent arbitrariness of the Spelling Bee word list. I’m an addict too, and I too am puzzled.

Merriam-Webster hyphenates cha-cha, yo-yo, and tom-tom, so there’s a rationale for disallowing those words. But the Bee accepts weird things like nene (“an endangered goose [Branta sandvicensis synonym Nesochen sandvicensis] of the Hawaiian Islands that usually inhabits waterless uplands and feeds on berries and vegetation”) while rejecting hoopoe (“any of a genus [Upupua of the family Upupidae] of crested Old World nonpasserine birds having a slender decurved bill and barred black-and-white wings and tail”), which happens to be the national bird of Israel. Go figure.

I asked the Times’s beekeeper in chief, Sam Ezersky, to explain how he decides what makes it onto the Bee’s word list, and he kindly replied at length. Here’s what he said:

Spelling Bee is curated with a widespread audience in mind; I want this game to appeal to solvers from various backgrounds and to anyone from “language learner” to self-described “word nerd.” This is why a game like this needs an editor in the first place: Having a human lens shape things to be enjoyable to a human audience. (An untouched unabridged dictionary would be a nonstarter – you should see the abundance of the Scrabble words, as I like to call them, that don’t make the cut!)

Now, it’s fascinating how one person’s wheelhouse is another’s esoterica, and vice versa. I’ll offer up an example, intended to be humorous: For every email/post/tweet I read that says “What in the world are all these science words, while such common foods are omitted?,” I’ll receive just as many that say “SO many weird foods, and not enough basic science vocabulary.” How can there possibly be a solution that appeals to, well, everyone?

So … I use my best judgment via research. This involves anything from dictionaries and word frequency statistics to real-world usage and articles in Google’s News tab. If a word doesn’t appear in one of my two go-to dictionaries — the New Oxford American version on my Mac, and Merriam-Webster’s online lexicon — that tends to give me pause. Same if it’s a form of a word that technically exists but is hard to imagine in a natural context and doesn’t google well outside of dictionary entries. And for more of the know-it-or you don’t terms: Is it limited to a specific profession/background and largely unknown outside of it? Could you find it used in a major article without an accompanying definition? My ultimate guiding question is: “What feels fair to our audience?”

Regarding bird names like nene and hoopoe, you’ve mentioned how I handle them currently. But, I expect — and respect — that many readers would follow the processes I described above and arrive at different conclusions. This is just how it goes when creating any boundary for our English language, and there isn’t one right answer.

All of which is to say: It only makes sense that Spelling Bee’s word list could be perceived as “arbitrary.” But I’m always keeping my ear to the ground in the hopes that the game will continue to evolve with its audience. After all, the humanness of Spelling Bee — and the literal "buzz" around it — is what makes the game so beautiful, and more than just a bite-sized daily diversion.