Here there are Letter Boxed February 02, 2023 Answers from New York Times Games. Our solutions and answers are 100% valid and accurate. We suggest to try and solve the game by your own before using the help of our website.
Sides of this Letter Box are:
ERIOAYKNPJGC
The answers are:
JOCKEYINGGRAPE
Official.
Cant wait for someone to see a theme for this one.
A vintner, an enologist, a sommelier, a grape jockey.
Grape jockeying is just trying to prove your varietal is the best.
I pictured Peewwee’s Fridge and a race involving banana steeds
JOCKEYING GRAPE, One of a bunch of applicants vying for a bit part in the raisin commercial.
👍
Or the Fruit of the Loom protagonist and his preferred briefs.
…..or a silks hue at Saratoga….!
Yikes-
PYROGENIC – CARJACKING
Good work, Jill! I came in all but assured we had another single-solution puzzle, but here you are proving that false right off the bat. I also appreciate the thematic integrity, neatly encapsulating the Road Warrior movie franchise.
Much more entertaining solution than the official!
Congrats! Don’t see any other variations. It was the official solution for me.
CARJACKING GEOPONY (which i putin as a goof considering today’s theme but is a word)
Geopony! That’s a new one on me. Thanks, Oscar!
Awesome! I wrestled for a good while with Carjacking but couldn’t pair it.
I messed around with Carjacking, then saw Jockey Yearning, then the Jockeying Grape.
Official
Same
Same
Official
A rather quick -& predictable- official here as well, only after gunning for -JACK-s (I seem to recall thinking CARJACK was not doable for some weird reason), JARGON, and the -subsequently verbalized- JOCKEY. Quite a restrictive -albeit not a particularly tough one; J (being the rarest letter in English) typically points to the solution in and of itself.
There are interestingly different methodologies for determining letter frequency, and they do not all agree, but I am not aware of one that puts J last. Cryptography textbooks typically have it fourth-last (followed by X and then either Z or Q). Random textual analysis puts in on a par with X, but ahead of Q and Z. One oft-cited dictionary analysis has it second-last with Q as the rarest. All of this inclined me to think that whoever decided the value of Scrabble tiles must have been a cryptographer!
It has to be just as disputed as which dictionary entries you take into account, hasn’t it? Bestwordlist.com has J as the least common, but I guess a similar strategy applies for any of Q, Z, X with regard to LB.
Ah, I see what you are claiming now. According to bestwordlist.com, J occurs in fewer words than any other letter. That is different from letter frequency, but it does make me wonder what master list they are using. Wordfind.com uses the Scrabble list and in it there are almost twice as many words containing J as Q.
Like I said, it’s as grey an area as the word list thing we’ve been going back & forth about since the beginning of time… But how’s frequency different from the number of words that include a letter? If it is the case that the latter does not account for double (triple etc.) occurrences in the same word, I would consider that to be more to the point, as regards LB than frequency itself.
You are correct about the difference. E is the most frequent letter in part because it repeats within words so often.
With LB, it is hard to say which metric is more useful because the usefulness of a letter so often depends upon its placement. While J is an infrequent letter, for example, there are many ways to use it in this array:
IOU-EFX-SJL-YNR
DW, for your array IOU-EFX-SJL-YNR,
I only found
UNJOYFUL LUXURIES
Are there more?
FLUXILE—ENJOYERS
15/2
Fluxile = obsolete form of fluid
Whether LB would have accepted that I do not know.
You continue to expand my vocabulary.
Fluxile is a lovely word!
Unless DW’s got some sneaky, stellar, single-worder up his sleeve…
🙂
You found the one I had in mind as a solution, Jill, but I confess I don’t know how many others there may be (though I really liked Mark’s! I’m going to start using FLUXILE now). I mainly designed the array to show how it is possible to find so many J words if the placement is congenial, e.g. JOY, JOYFUL, ENJOY, UNJOYFUL, JEJUNE, JINX, SOJU, etc. There may be more.
By the way, I got my hands on a copy of POEMS FOR ARCHITECTS today. I look forward to curling up with it!
Official
JOCKEY-YEARNING … but, oh no, I missed out one letter … how will I ever fill the GAP?
I’m jockeying a grape
I think this will be my last report from the intersection of LB and Spelling Bee, as it has not proven as amusing as hoped.
Today’s common letters: A, G, O, N, R, with R required.
The overlap: Agar, Agora, Angora, Argon, Gorgon, Gran, Grog, Orang, Organ, Raga and Rang.
Official. 🏇🍇
Kudos to those who got different solution
So much for your engagement in apophenia, Bernie? I did follow your accounts as closely as possible but, having no axe to grind re Spelling Bee, I was unable to pitch in.
(in reply to BERNIE HOROWITZ 1:10 PM)
I think they’re all in it together! – which I guess is more paranoia than apophenia… Nah. Basically, it just turned out to be too much time for too little pay-off.
Paranoia & apophenia don’t seem to me to be mutually exclusive; I’m pretty sure there are people out there who enjoy both. 😉
Let’s hear it for a good old fashion pyrogenic carjacking
Where’s the other solutions?
PANICKY PARANOIA PEAKING, PINING becoming PAINING,
Too GORY, too GAGING, too GRAINY, to be GRACING my GAINING?
Still EYING, still YEARNING, still EARNING,
This game is ENGAGING, sometimes ENRAGING, almost ENCAGING.
Official here too. Kudos to those with alternative answers. Such a fun puzzle.
Wonder why they didn’t accept JACKING – GROPEY, a wonderfully thematic 13/2 . . .
Agree with Brian, I got JACKING GROPEY first, then soon got the official answer JOCKEYING GRAPE.
Official here too
jockeying – grape