- Letters: U/DGNORT
- Words: 40
- Points: 164
- Pangrams: 1
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The table provides clues for the roots of words in today's NY Times Spelling Bee. You're responsible for prefixes, suffixes,
tense changes, plurals, doubling consonants before suffixes, and alternate spellings of roots. An exception:
since Sam won't allow S, when the root contains an S, the clue may be for a plural or suffixed form. "Mice" for example.
If a clue isn't self-explanatory, try googling it.
The TL;DR about the site comes after the table.
Past clues are available here |
Today's puzzle
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Table content |
| root # | answers covered | clue for root (answer may need prefix, suffix, tense change, alt spelling, ...) |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1 | Perform an action, achieve or complete something; hairstyle (American slang); social event (British slang) |
| 2 | 1 | Ring-shaped fried cake, modern spelling, older spelling is a pangram |
| 3 | 1 | Gloomy appearance or manner |
| 4 | 1 | Something you take when you're sick (or addicted) |
| 5 | 1 | Aquatic mammal with a forked tail that lives on the coasts of the Indian Ocean |
| 6 | 1 | Canoe made from a hollowed tree trunk; or where you'll find a baseball team's bench |
| 7 | 1 | Animal manure |
| 8 | 1 | Shoulder-shrug non-response to a question; “I have no idea”; slang |
| 9 | 1 | Fleshy fruit with hard skin (some are eaten, some are used for decoration, usually in the Fall) |
| 10 | 1 | Swollen foot disease from excess uric acid; Ben Franklin had it |
| 11 | 2 | The solid surface of the earth, noun; prohibit from flying, verb, gerund form is a pangram |
| 12 | 1 | Baseball play involving a batted ball that touches the earth and gets to first base before the batter does, compound pangram |
| 13 | 1 | Paste for filling gaps in tiles |
| 14 | 1 | Short & low (esp. pig) sound; or slang term for lowly soldier or worker |
| 15 | 1 | Indian spiritual teacher |
| 16 | 1 | In grammar, a person, place or thing |
| 17 | 1 | Full, round, and imposing voice; or pompous writing |
| 18 | 1 | One-up, surpass, compound verb |
| 19 | 1 | opposite of inside the house, adj., compound |
| 20 | 1 | $ spent, to a CPA, literal opposite of “income”; or, in gerund form, extroverted, compound |
| 21 | 1 | Have better or more weapons (pistols), or surpass in power, compound |
| 22 | 1 | Closing show music (antonym begins with IN–) |
| 23 | 1 | Sprint more quickly or farther in a footrace than someone else, compound |
| 24 | 1 | Make a bell sound, verb/noun; encircle, verb/noun |
| 25 | 1 | Cheap liquor (literally, what it does to your stomach), compound |
| 26 | 1 | Plump (Saint Nick might be called this) |
| 27 | 1 | Circular, adj.; or move through a turn, verb; or replace a number with the nearest whole number, verb, gerund form is a pangram |
| 28 | 1 | Disorderly retreat, or decisive defeat |
| 29 | 1 | Slight error in rotating tool, compound |
| 30 | 1 | Smallest of the litter |
| 31 | 1 | Take a guided one of these in a foreign city (on a … bus?) adj/noun/verb |
| 32 | 1 | Promote, or offer horse racing tips |
| 33 | 1 | Common game fish (rainbow …, e.g.) |
| 34 | 1 | Change direction, verb/noun/adj. (use your … signal when driving!) |
| 35 | 1 | Number of people who show up at an event (we had a great … last night for our poetry reading), compound |
| 36 | 1 | Private instructor |
| 37 | 1 | Ballet skirt, or S Afr Bishop Desmond |
| 38 | 1 | Japanese noodles |
| 39 | 1 | Archaic preposition (Handel’s Messiah “For … us a child is born”) |
This site provides clues for a day's New York Times Spelling Bee puzzle. It follows in Kevin Davis' footsteps. The original set of 4,500 clues came from him, and they still make up about three quarters of the current clue set.
The "Bee Roots" approach is to provide explicit clues for root words, not every word. As logophiles, we are pretty good at putting on prefixes and suffixes, changing tense, and forming plurals (including Latin plurals!). The clues cover root words, arranged alphabetically by root word, with a count of words in the puzzle that come from each root. For example, if a puzzle includes ROAM and ROAMING, there will be a clue for ROAM and a count of 2. The root may not appear in the puzzle at all; for example, the 2021-07-23 Bee included ICED, DEICE, and DEICED. For such a puzzle, the clue would be for ICE with a word count of 3.
The Bee Roots approach involves judgement sometimes. For example, if a puzzle includes LOVE, LOVED, and LOVELY, how many roots are needed to cover them? LOVE and LOVED share the root LOVE, certainly, but LOVELY is tricky. LOVE is part of its etymology, but by now, the word means "exquisitely beautiful," which is a lot farther from the meaning of LOVE than swithcing to past tense. I'm inclined to treat LOVE and LOVELY as separate roots. You may not agree, which is fine. Another thing we logophiles share is a LOVE of arguing about words on Twitter.
A few words can have one meaning as a suffixed form and another as a stand-alone word. EVENING, for example. In those cases I will use the meaning that I think is more common.
One last complication, until another one pops up: a few roots have multiple spellings, for example LOLLYGAG and LALLYGAG. Depending on the day's letters, and maybe even the editor's whims, one or both could be in the puzzle's answer list. With such roots, you could see a word count of 2, even if there are no applicable prefixes or suffixes.
I will do my best to keep this site up to date and helpful (I hope). Check it out, and tweet feedback to @donswartwout Tweet to @donswartwout