It always trips me up how ij is one letter in Dutch since I learned Dutch spelling with ij and not the y version. The y version was the normal Greek one.

For non-Dutchies: y = y and y = ij, they both have different sounds.

Even though ij often fills a single square in puzzle, it is not a character in the Dutch alphabet. It is sometimes incorrectly assumed to be in place of y (y is only used for foreign words). It is a combination of i and j, but has special uppercasing rules in that they are uppercased together; e.g. IJzer (iron). There's even a Unicode codepoint assigned as well: ij (U+0133 LATIN SMALL LIGATURE IJ), although its use is discouraged.

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IJ_(digraph) and https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/IJ_(digraaf).

Some people are really inconsistent about this, insisting it's a single letter, despite it not having a place in the alphabet. Some do try to give it a place in the alphabet in place of the 'y', or before or after it but still insisting there's only 26 letters in the alphabet.

It's really a digraph, a phoneme made out of two characters. But it's an inconsistent digraph in that both characters are capitalised together, whereas with other digraphs, only the first is capitalised.

It's not entirely true that 'y' is only used in foreign words. It's used in import words that have been part of the Dutch language for a very long time now. 'Royaal' and 'symbool' are not spelled like that in any neighbouring language, so they've been thoroughly Dutchified over the centuries. They're not foreign anymore.

> There's even a Unicode codepoint assigned as well: ij (U+0133 LATIN SMALL LIGATURE IJ)

And that codepoint was actually massively helpful to represent the ij-as-single-letter in the practice application: https://lingo.vincenttunru.com

A few months ago, someone tried to register her newborn in Brussels (which is officially a bilingual city: Dutch and French) with a name starting with IJ, and had a very hard time convincing the French speaking civil servants that both characters had to be capitalized: https://www.bruzz.be/samenleving/geboorteaangifte-brussel-st...

Its not in the alphabet tho

Very cool. Some questions - How many games (?) in a row did you win and how much money was this? How many episodes did you appear on? How does this compare to other top players? Thanks.

> - How many games (?) in a row did you win

We won four in a row, then lost the fifth one in the final round due to two mistakes on our side and a bit of bad luck.

> and how much money was this?

When you reach the finals, you take part in what amounts to a lottery for which the number of tickets you get is determined by how well you play. If you win, you get €2500, if you lose, you get the amount of money you earned in the first round, which is comparatively negligible. We consistently got a reasonably high score in the finals, and with that won the lottery once, which I'd guess is about or slightly lower than the expected success rate.

Do note that the amount was per-team and before taxes, so in the end it amounted to a little bit more than €1000 per person. A nice little bonus, but probably lower than my usual rate given the amount of work put in, so it really was mostly about the fun we had doing it. (And an additional unexpected bonus is that it gave my brother quite some exposure as a comedian.)

> How many episodes did you appear on?

Five: the four we won, and the one we lost.

> How does this compare to other top players?

There haven't been that many episodes yet, and to be fair, I don't really watch the show usually, but it's certainly better than average (since most people just lose the first game they're in), and probably slightly better than the mean winner - though of course, we're doing it with no natural talent and being loyal viewers of the show. There are certainly quite a few who do better than we did though.

Very cool. Thanks for the details. Final question - how many rounds in a game?

There isn't actually a set number of rounds, I think it mostly depends on how long the rounds take. (I think there's about 15 minutes playing time for the first round.) I haven't rewatched an episode to keep track, but my guess would be it's about four five-letter words and four six-letter words. After that, there's always one seven-letter word (in which both teams take turns making guesses).