“I found a really great word that was not accepted in Spelling Bee. It’s an actual word, so why didn’t they take it?”

According to a previous version of the Spelling Bee help page, the accepted word list is curated to focus mostly on common words. “We also try to avoid terms that are very specific to any professional field,” the page used to say, “such as terms that might be familiar to, for example, a physician, ornithologist or geologist, but not to people outside of that field of expertise.”

Still, sometimes the words they exclude are real headscratchers. The good news is, if you click the include disallowed matches checkbox on our main Solver page, you’ll at least have the satisfaction of seeing that your word is part of a large set of other disallowed words. And if you don’t find your word in our expanded list, please let us know.

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