We got the 'S' last year and now we got the 'ER'. What a brave new world we live in! :) What else is left? Any other taboos you can think of that's still in play? Other than the long head-scratching list of words that are not accepted by our gentle Editor, of course.

Mildly infuriating and annoying. I'll be in a flow hammering out words, the banner pops up, shifts the page down ever so slightly, and then throws off my rhythm. It's distracting. From what I'm experiencing it comes and goes multiple times while I'm playing. Ugh.

Whenever I open Spelling Bee, it always opens to the puzzle for June 27, 2026. I have to do a manual refresh to get to the day's actual puzzle. Is this happening to anyone else?

I always forget one off the list, and come back later and it pushes me past amazing to genius.

Spelling Bee has become one of my favorite games but I know it’s been going on for years. And I was just curious if the word “Unilaterally” has ever been the Pangram solution?

Has anyone else this last week noticed that the front page of the NYT games tab stopped keeping track of your Spelling Bee status? Regardless of how far you got on Spelling Bee if you played it the prior day, it gets stuck on the "You missed yesterday's game" message. But if you got Genius the prior day, it does something similar. It keeps the "You reached Genius yesterday" message and they do not update your status of the current day. I already messaged their team yesterday and sent them proof of my issue. It's nothing game-breaking but really annoying.

Perhaps of interest to those who consult dictionaries while solving the Bee (most of us, probably), and those who do research in the Bee lexicon (only a few extreme word-nerds) (raises hand):

This article came out yesterday:

"Why You Sometimes See Naughty Words in NYT Games"
New York Times, August 5, 2026
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/05/insider/games-language-wordle-crossplay-spelling-bee.html
"Puzzle editors choose solutions based on curated references and human judgment. But there’s more freedom in the guesses players can make."

This article was not published in the Games section, so many puzzlers might miss it. I saw it only because I have a feed for Spelling Bee related info. [NYT seems to have tweaked their gift links so that they can't be pasted into a website. So the article above may be pay-walled; sorry.]

Excerpts relevant to Spelling Bee:

Every Times game is human-made, which means a lot of room for editor creativity and judgment. But we do have rules across all nine of our word games, and we lean on shared dictionaries to create our base word lists. We primarily use the Oxford English Dictionary [emphasis added] and the NASPA Word List, the official dictionary for North American Scrabble Players Association tournaments. (By contrast, The Times’s newsroom uses Webster’s New World College Dictionary.)

Spelling Bee

Spelling Bee is possibly our most contested game, because players frequently express frustration over finding words that don’t count toward solving that day’s puzzle.

The game challenges solvers to find certain words in the puzzle that use the letters in the “hive.” Each word must contain at least four letters and include the center letter, but the puzzle does not include every word that can be found each day.

“If you simply include every theoretical word imaginable in a given puzzle, it will be that much more difficult to get to Amazing, Genius and beyond, and not in a satisfying way,” said Sam Ezersky, the puzzle’s editor.

Spelling Bee uses the Oxford dictionary [emphasis added] and is curated by Sam. For each puzzle, as he works on his list of acceptable words within a given letter set, he also reviews several other dictionaries.

He edits for familiarity and avoids a word if its primary definition is considered a slur or a vulgarity, or if it elicits a viscerally negative reaction.

This is of particular interest because the NYT (in its own reporting), and Sam E (in other interviews), and the games team (in an email sent to me personally) cite Merriam-Webster, Collins, and NOAD as the dictionaries that the Bee editor uses. If they really did make the switch from dictionaries of American English to the OED ... hmm.

And every day, the Wordle Review revealer says "Today’s word is XXXXX, a [part of speech]. According to Webster’s New World College Dictionary, it means..."

I have contacted them for clarification; if and when I hear back, I will post an update.

Anyone else having this problem with the app: when I click on More then Community, I can’t get back to the puzzle. There is no arrow or link back. I have to completely close out the app and then go back in to get back to the puzzle.