{"id":27482,"date":"2025-05-14T17:22:46","date_gmt":"2025-05-14T22:22:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/?p=27482"},"modified":"2025-05-14T20:15:00","modified_gmt":"2025-05-15T01:15:00","slug":"headpin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/?p=27482","title":{"rendered":"The missing word"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been doing the NY Times Spelling Bee pretty much every day for the last several years. For the most part it has been a faithful companion — challenging to my brain, while soothing to my nerves.<\/p>\n

But today there was a surprise. To get a perfect score, I believed that I needed to find 41 words (and 207 points), as you can see in the screen capture below left.<\/p>\n

Yet after I had entered 40 words (and accumulated only 193 points), the app declared that I had found all possible words, as you can see in the screen capture below right, which is showing the first 24 words out of 40.<\/p>\n

The missing 14 points would have come from two things: 7 points for finding a seven letter word, plus an extra 7 points for that word being a pangram (a word that uses all seven letters).<\/p>\n

As you can see in the image to the left, there are supposed to be three pangrams. But the app told me that I had achieved a “Queen Bee” — a perfect score — even though I had found only two pangrams.<\/p>\n

Somehow there is a discrepancy today between the instructions and the game itself — something I had never encountered before. I had often wondered whether something like this could ever occur in Spelling Bee, and now I know.<\/p>\n

Frankly, I feel cheated. It’s like going bowling and being told that you’ve just bowled a perfect strike. But you know, in your heart of hearts, that you only knocked down nine pins, because the headpin was missing.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been doing the NY Times Spelling Bee pretty much every day for the last several years. For the most part it has been a faithful companion — challenging to my brain, while soothing to my nerves. But today there was a surprise. To get a perfect score, I believed that I needed to find … Continue reading “The missing word”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27482"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=27482"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27482\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27495,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27482\/revisions\/27495"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=27482"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=27482"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=27482"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}