Spelling Bee Solver

How to use the solver

The tool above needs two pieces of information: the center letter (the one that has to appear in every word) and the six letters surrounding it. Enter them exactly as they appear in your puzzle, in any order for the outer six.

1. Type the center letter into the first box. It gets highlighted so you always know which letter is mandatory.
2. Type the other six letters into the second box, in any order. Duplicate keystrokes are ignored automatically so you can't accidentally overwrite a slot.
3. Results appear as soon as both fields have enough to work with. Each word shows its point value, and pangrams are marked with a gold border.
4. Use the sort buttons to switch between longest-first, alphabetical, or pangrams-first ordering, and tick "Pangrams only" to filter down to just those.
5. Hit "Reset letters" to clear both fields and start over with a new puzzle.

What counts as a valid word here

This solver follows the same word-validity rules the actual game uses, which are public and well documented:

• Every word must be at least 4 letters long. Anything shorter is skipped, even if it technically fits the letters.
• Only the 7 letters you entered are allowed, nothing else. A single stray letter in a candidate word disqualifies it.
• Any of the 7 letters, including the center one, can be reused as many times as you like within a word.
• The center letter must show up somewhere in the word, not just be available.
• Proper nouns, hyphenated words, and words that need an apostrophe are not included, matching how the real puzzle scores them.

What is a pangram, and why it matters

A pangram is any valid word that uses all 7 of your letters at least once, not just the center one. If your letters are C, I, N, O, P, R, T with center O, a word like "CORPORATION" would be worth checking for a possible pangram, since it happens to touch every one of those letters. Pangrams score more, and the tool marks them with a gold border and a bold point badge so you can spot them at a glance instead of scanning the whole word list by hand. See the how to play guide for the full scoring breakdown, including exactly how many bonus points a pangram is worth.

Today's puzzle changes daily, and so does this tool

The real Spelling Bee publishes a fresh set of 7 letters every day, and this solver was built around that fact rather than around a single day's answers. There is no fixed "today's answers" page to keep updating and no risk of it going stale. Copy today's letters from wherever you're playing, type them in above, and the word list updates in real time as you type. If you want to see the tool work through a few sample puzzles before trying your own, the worked examples page walks through several complete letter sets step by step.

Not affiliated with The New York Times

Spelling Bee is a daily word puzzle published by The New York Times. This site is an independent, unofficial helper built for people playing that puzzle (or a similar one elsewhere) who want a quick way to check a word or see what they're missing. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to The New York Times Company in any way, and it does not republish or reproduce their daily answer key. You bring your own letters; the tool just does the matching.

Common mistakes when solving Spelling Bee

A few small slip-ups account for most of the "why isn't this word showing up" moments:

• Mixing up which letter is the center one. If the center letter is wrong, entire valid words get filtered out for a reason that isn't obvious from the results screen.
• Typing a letter twice in the outer-six box by accident. The tool dedupes as you type, but it's still worth double-checking against your actual puzzle.
• Expecting 3-letter words to appear. The real game (and this tool) requires 4 letters minimum, so short words never show up even if they're technically valid English.
• Assuming a word isn't in the dictionary because it's missing here. See the word list page for how the underlying dictionary is built and why a small number of obscure or very informal words won't be included.

A worked example, start to finish

Say today's letters are A, E, G, L, M, N, T with N as the center letter. Type N into the center box, then A E G L M T into the other six (order doesn't matter). The results list fills in immediately with everything from short 4-letter words like "MEAL" and "LANE" up through longer ones. "MAGNET" is in there too, six letters, all drawn from the set, with the required N right in the middle of the word. Scanning for a pangram, this set actually has one: "GENTLEMAN" uses every one of A, E, G, L, M, N, T (with a couple of letters repeated) and includes the required center N, so it shows up with a gold border the moment it's found instead of staying buried in a plain alphabetical list. That's really the whole workflow: type the letters once, then use the sort and filter controls to explore instead of re-typing anything.

Strategy tips for finding more words

A few habits make a real difference once you're stuck partway through a puzzle:

• Sort by length first. The longest matches are usually the ones you'd miss by scanning manually, and they're worth checking for a pangram before anything else.
• Think in common prefixes and suffixes built from your letters. If "-ING", "-ED", or "RE-" can be formed from your 7 letters, entire families of words tend to show up together.
• Don't skip short words. A pile of small 4- and 5-letter finds adds up fast, even if none of them feel as satisfying as a long one.
• Check the pangrams-first sort every time before you assume you're done. A pangram is easy to miss in a long alphabetical list but impossible to miss once it's sorted to the top.
• If a word you're sure is real isn't showing up, re-check your center letter first. It's the single most common reason a whole batch of expected words goes missing at once.

Ranks and scoring, briefly

The live results counter above adds up a running score as you narrow things down: a standard word is worth 1 point per letter (a 4-letter word is a flat 1 point, everything longer is 1 point per letter), and a pangram adds a 7-point bonus on top of its own length score. In the real game, your running total across a full puzzle earns you a rank, from "Beginner" up through "Genius" and "Queen Bee" for finding every valid word. This solver doesn't try to replicate the ranks themselves since they're specific to whichever version of the puzzle you're playing, but the point totals it shows use the same widely documented scoring rules, so you can sanity-check your own running total against it. The full breakdown, including how each rank threshold is typically calculated as a percentage of the maximum possible score, is on the how to play page.

A quick word glossary

A handful of terms come up constantly around this puzzle, so here's a short reference:

• Center letter: the one required letter that must appear at least once in every valid word, shown highlighted in the hive display above.
• Outer letters: the other six letters. Optional in any individual word, but nothing outside these seven (plus the center) is ever allowed.
• Pangram: a word using all 7 letters at least once. The highest-value single find in any puzzle.
• Perfect pangram: a rarer case where a pangram uses each of the 7 letters exactly once, no repeats at all. Not every puzzle has one.
• Hive: the honeycomb-shaped grid the real game displays the 7 letters in, echoed here as the small preview row above the results.

Why build another Spelling Bee helper

Most of the existing tools bury the actual word list behind ads, pop-ups, or a page that has to fully reload every time you change a letter. This one is a single page: type, see results, adjust, done. There's no account to create and no email address requested anywhere on the site.

The whole word-matching engine runs in JavaScript in your own browser once the dictionary has loaded, so once it's ready there's no waiting between keystrokes and results, no server round-trip for every letter you type, and no lag on a slow mobile connection once the initial load is done. It also works the same way on a phone as it does on a desktop: the layout is a single column that reflows cleanly at any width, and every control on the page is sized to be tapped comfortably with a thumb, not just clicked with a mouse.

There's also a light and dark theme built in, controlled by the toggle in the header, so the page doesn't force a bright white screen on you if you're solving a puzzle late at night. Your choice is remembered for next time.