JW Spelling Bee 2: Why Not Include "S"?
Why Not Include "S"? Update 9/2/25: Today, for just the second time, the NYT Spelling Bee editor included an "S" among the 7 Spelling Bee letters. Why 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 ho...