![]() What has that been like?Ībsolutely staggering, to be completely honest with you. This game has been such a source of entertainment and joy and community for people during the pandemic. But if I do allow it, people are going to be going, what the heck is that? People are absolutely going to know this, and they’re going to flame me on the internet. Sometimes I spend up to an hour going back and forth on just a single word alone, going, like well, this is damned if I do, damned if I don’t. And then I’ll get a similar complaint from someone saying, this is so darn unfairly science-heavy, which leaves me in the dust, but why does it not allow any of these foods that I know? The most common complaints tend to be around words that people recognize from doing crosswords over and over again, that I don’t like to add in the Spelling Bee because I believe it’s a different experience. I will receive complaints that this puzzle, for all the foods it allows, it clearly doesn’t recognize science, or something like that. What are the most common “why wasn’t this word accepted?” complaints? What are the most common “why was this word accepted?” complaints? I know that at this point, everybody has a word or 10 words that they’ve like tried before and they’re like, why the heck isn’t that on the list? And it’s all subjective at the end of the day, right? My goal is, you don’t just want every last word in the dictionary to appear in this puzzle, or nobody’s ever going to get to “genius,” right? One person’s wheelhouse is another person’s esoterica. I have a testing panel who gives me excellent feedback on, what the heck is this word? There’s a lot of discussion around the word list on a given day. You don’t want there to be too few words, and you don’t want the longer words to be so hard that it’s going to be impossible for anyone to get the “genius” because the longer words teeter on technical. If the pangram is not something that my audience can even figure out in the first place or is enjoyable to figure out, then what’s the point of the whole puzzle? You don’t want there to be too many words. I start with the pangrams, actually, because that is the linchpin of the puzzle. I have a database of every possible puzzle that could be created, right? My goal, which is why a game like this needs an editor in general rather than a computer, is to actually come up with the good, enjoyable puzzles. It’s too much credit to say that I just sit back in a chair and come up with these. So with UVA right there in the background, that hangout session kind of evolved into what paved my way to my career now, that very moment in Charlottesville in May of 2016.Ĭan you walk us through the process of how you create a Spelling Bee? I actually point-blank reached out to him and was like, hey, do you want to get together? And to my surprise, he was like, oh yeah, I’d love to come over. Will Shortz (Law ’77) himself, the longtime editor of the Times crossword, gave his keynote speech at the law school in 2016, and I happened to be in Charlottesville at the time. I was all set to go work in an engineering career, and then my dream job opened up and went directly to me. And then, frankly, right place at the right time. I continued to make puzzles in my time at UVA, expecting it to just be like a passion project that was developing. And then I actually had my first puzzle published in the Times when I was still in high school. I started submitting puzzles as a teenager. Of course, they were not Times-caliber publishable things. I was drawing up little crossword grids in crayon. On long car rides, a normal person might be playing on their Game Boy, which I also did, or just like playing I Spy in the back seat. ![]() I’ve been solving them or similar puzzles since I was 5, 6 years old. I have been into crosswords and other word puzzles for genuinely almost as long as I can remember. ![]() Melissa Bunni Elian for The New York Times
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