Hacker News Reader

Official rules say otherwise: "Each puzzle includes at least one “pangram,” which uses every letter."

https://www.nytimes.com/puzzles/spelling-bee -> click on 'How to Play'

I've always assumed they generate the puzzle starting from a pangram.

This is the assumption I started with when I started building my clone.

That's exactly how it works. The script scanned the dictionary for pangrams and then built the puzzles from that list, filtering out pangrams that didn't meet the other rules for the game.

The 2140 or so puzzles I've grabbed over the years all have at least one panagram.

> 1: 1642, 2: 364, 3: 90, 4: 24, 7: 2, 5: 12, 6: 5, 8: 1

That 8 panagram day was December 16, 2021

https://nytbee.com/ is an excellent source for historical data, if you'd like to try to track it down.