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JW Spelling Bee 2: Why Not Include "S"?

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Why Not Include "S"? Why indeed did the NYT editors decide to omit "S" from Spelling Bee puzzles? Did they look at any data? Or did they just go by instinct?  They might have considered a basic high-school math counting principle tells us that including S increases the possible combinations of 7 letters from 480,700 (25 choose 7) to 657,800 (26 choose 7) -- an increase of 37%. But how many of those combinations are valid puzzlecombos (i.e., 7 letter combinations that yield a pangram)?  I used Mathematica to dig into the problem and determine the  actual  effects of including S in Spelling Bee. As it turns out, the number of puzzlecombos jumps from 4802 (with no S) to 9482, an increase of 97%. So adding S to the mix has an outsized effect on increasing the number of available puzzlecombos. This makes intuitive sense when you consider how many words contain S. Effect of S on the Spelling Bee puzzle universe I asked Mathematica to solve all 66,374 puzzles (i.e., 7 x 94
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JW Spelling Bee 1: Unicorns and Other Oddities

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Spelling Bee Unicorns and Other Oddities The word JUKEBOX is a unicorn in the New York Times puzzle Spelling Bee. It's one of 5 unicorns (my label) in Spelling Bee, and it has the honor of being the most unicorn (unicorniest?) of the bunch, for reasons I'll explain later. I got hooked on Spelling Bee earlier this year. It's a game in which you try to make as many words as possible out of 7 given letters. I'm also a Mathematica nerd, and I started dreaming up ways that Mathematica could help me analyze Spelling Bee puzzles.  My first foray into Spelling Bee programming was to write code that gives all possible solutions to a given puzzle ( https://www.wolframcloud.com/obj/jeffw/SpellingBee ). I wrote it so that it could run on my phone, which was handy for me because I usually do Spelling Bee while eating breakfast. For those of you who immediately thought, "That's just cheating," I will note that I use the program as a tool of last resort -- to find remain
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