spelling_bee_sting

The New York Times has a daily puzzle called "Spelling Bee", which lists 7 distinct letters, which are to be combined to form as many words as possible. One letter is special, and must always be used in each word. Words must be at least 4 letters long. Candidate words are checked against a (hidden) dictionary. Some words are excluded for being profane, racist or obscure.

There have been times when what seems a perfectly legitimate word has been rejected. Sometimes a possible reason can be deduced, but other times the ruling makes no sense. Moreover, a number of words are accepted which seem irregular, obscure, or foreign.

gogo, haha, hoho, nono, yoyo

I can't be proud of these, but Spelling Bee pretends to have never heard of them.

boho, bohos

I only guessed boho out of desperation, and was somewhat irked that this shortening of "Bohemian" was accepted. The Spelling Bee dictionary must think "boho" is strictly an adjective (but it's not) and so it rejected my subsequent word "bohos".

gonna, wanna

Sure, these are common representations of slurred pronunciations. But are they words? Spelling Bee thinks so. Then what about hadda, hafta, woulda, shoulda, coulda, dunno, kinda?

llano

Spelling Bee thinks this is a word. I only knew this was a possible word because the "Hints" menu said that one word began with "LL". Given the choices "Olnaych", I was able to figure out that it must be "llano"...which is a Spanish word, but not one that I would say has worked its way into English.

coon

Spelling Bee rejects this, presumably for reasons of taste.

halon

Spelling Bee thinks this is a NOT word, but it used to be an important chemical component of fire extinguishers.

monic

Spelling Bee thinks this is a NOT word. It is, at least to math people, and Spelling Bee does accept "nonagon", which is also a math word, but much more obscure.

halloo

Spelling Bee thinks this is a NOT word. It is, at least to English people.

local, locally, nonlocal, nonlocally

Three of these are acceptable, and the last one is not. Can you explain why? This suggests the dictionary is really not consistent, or is too lazy to consider all the possibilities.