I don’t want to let another Labor Day go by without addressing a certain elephant in the room; a spell-ephant, if you will. Most of us celebrate the holiday without giving a second thought to how we would spell it on paper. Meanwhile, many English-speaking readers of this newsletter observe the holiday using a different spelling: Labour Day. “Labor” and “labour” sound the same, of course, since the U is silent — but reader, I no longer can be. As one raised in Canada but stationed stateside, I am sympathetic to speakers of British English — BrE, as it’s sometimes abBrEviated — who “labour” at New York Times Games knowing that some of their language is not represented in the daily Crossword or the Spelling Bee. I relate to the desire to see a double L, an S in place of a Z, and to call it “zed,” while you’re at it. So I was thrilled to discover, not too long ago, that there’s someone documenting the distinctions. Lynne Murphy, a professor of linguistics at the University of Sussex, has been keeping a running list on her blog since 2020 called “Perfectly Common BrE Words the @NYTimesGames Spelling Bee Has Denied Me: An Occasional Series.” Professor Murphy told me that, as of this writing, there are 312 words. They include the expected BrE spellings like “fuelled,” “moult” and “odour,” but also bits of vocabulary absent from (or disused in) the AmE lexicon, such as “eyeline,” “footman,” “tuppence” and “abattoir.” “Now, I have to admit, not all the words on the ‘perfectly common’ list are perfectly common and not all of them were denied to me personally,” she said. “British players now send me their ‘denied’ words, many of them regional or rare.” Professor Murphy is from New York but moved to England in 2000, and her work has focused on the differences between the two. Kind of makes her the Switzerland of English, don’t you think? Some of the words have been added to the game since they were put on the list: WHINGE, HOOPOE and LOVAGE are in. When the status of a given word changes to being accepted, a little “has been added!” tag is tacked on beside it, but the word stays listed for archival purposes. “The whole reason I do this list (and the blog it’s on) is to educate about differences in British and American English,” Professor Murphy explained. “My ‘complaint’ about the word-denial is entirely tongue-in-cheek. Word games have to be based on word lists — and learning the list is part of the fun. And pointing out the absences can also be part of the fun.” Solve Today’s Capture
Puzzle of the WeekThis week, check out the Thursday, Sept. 3 puzzle by Zhou Zhang. In her constructor notes, Zhang wrote: “Amazingly, this is my 10th puzzle in The Times. Ten isn’t just a lovely, round number. It’s also a milestone number. As a society, we celebrate 10s: 10th birthdays, 10th anniversaries, toddlers being able to count to 10.” Read about Zhang’s other meaningful numbers, plus tips and insights into this puzzle in the Wordplay column.
How are we doing? We’d love your feedback on this newsletter. Please email thoughts and suggestions to crosswordeditors@nytimes.com. Thanks for playing! Subscribe to New York Times Games.
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