00:00I am convinced at heart that anybody can be a puzzle person.
00:04It is such a great way to scratch certain itches in your brain that you didn't know that you could scratch.
00:16It's how many words can you find using the seven letters in each day's hive.
00:22But the catch is letters can be used more than once and every word you find must include the center letter.
00:29We actually ran a spelling bee on Valentine's Day and one of the pangrams was valentine.
00:36Funny enough, there's also a second pangram, right? There's ventilate.
00:40Who knew that you could make both those words with the same seven letters? Why not?
00:44That's another 16 points your way.
00:51Part of the editing comes with pruning the word list, I should say.
00:56Which is, I am asking myself what feels fair for a widespread audience.
01:03Whether you are a younger or older solver, a beginner solver or an expert, a word game maven,
01:10I want you to be able to strive for whatever spelling bee tier works for you.
01:15In doing my research, I have dictionaries at my disposal. I do not edit this word list as a gut check.
01:22I'm simply making calls based on what the dictionaries are showing me.
01:27I like using Google's news tab a lot.
01:29My goal is to see word games and other puzzle games take a direction where they can really appeal to
01:36and employ so many different voices, so many different backgrounds,
01:41so that we can continue to shape games for, truthfully, everybody out there.
01:53I'm still like a kid in a candy store every time I have a puzzle published.
01:57Crosswords are how I got my start.
01:59I joke that I have an awful work-life balance because I still make crosswords in my spare time.
02:04I can't help myself. Crosswords are my first love.
02:07They're how I got into this. Anybody can submit a puzzle to the Times.
02:11So, I have been avidly, amateurly and then semi-professionally been constructing puzzles since high school.
02:19I had my first puzzle published in the New York Times when I was 17 years old.
02:28I could not have expected Spelling Bee, as passionate as I am about this game,
02:33to have been such a smashing success, a real craze in 2020, 2021 and beyond.
02:39I think it's the type of game that you want to discuss further.
02:43Whether you are an avid player who picks apart the word list on a given day, which is completely fine,
02:48or whether you're just like, it is a puzzle that you can all come together and solve.
03:00For starters, no vulgar slang or outright slurs. Those are instant no-goes.
03:06Also, and this seems to trip people up from time to time,
03:09No capitalized proper name. Of course, there are exceptions to this that might be confusing.
03:13Did you know that Manhattan, when referring to the drink, is actually stylized lowercase, per Merriam-Webster?
03:27Tell me something that's an absolute flex to a niche group, but means nothing to the majority.
03:34The girls that get it, get it.
03:36The girls that get it, get it.
03:38Not too many Queen Bee solvers out there on a given day.
03:41Very, very, very small subset.
03:43So, give yourself a pat on the back if you've ever managed to achieve Queen Bee,
03:47finding every last word out there on a given day.
03:50There's something so satisfying about just chipping away at moving up toward success.
03:56Being able to have a modal that says,
04:00or awesome, this many more points, congratulations, keep going.
04:05And I think there's just something so comforting about that.
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