How to Play Spelling Bee

The basic rules

Every puzzle gives you exactly 7 letters. One of them, shown in the middle of the honeycomb, is the center letter. The other six surround it. From there, the rules are fixed and don't change from puzzle to puzzle:

• Words must be at least 4 letters long. Shorter combinations don't count, no matter how valid they'd otherwise be.
• Only the 7 given letters can be used, and no letter outside that set is ever allowed, not even common ones.
• Letters can repeat as many times as needed within a single word. A letter being one of your 7 doesn't limit how many times it shows up.
• The center letter has to appear somewhere in every word you submit. Miss it, and the word doesn't count, even if every other letter fits.
• Proper nouns (names of people, places, brands) are excluded, along with hyphenated words and words that require an apostrophe.

How scoring works

Each word earns points based on its length, with one deliberate exception at the low end:

• A 4-letter word is always worth exactly 1 point, regardless of which letters it uses.
• Any word longer than 4 letters is worth 1 point per letter. A 6-letter word is 6 points, an 8-letter word is 8 points, and so on.
• A pangram, a word that uses all 7 letters at least once, gets a flat 7-point bonus added on top of its normal length score. An 8-letter pangram is therefore worth 8 base points plus 7 bonus points, 15 points total.
• There is no penalty for guessing wrong or for repeating a word you've already found; the puzzle simply won't award points twice for the same word.

Pangrams in detail

A pangram is the single most valuable type of word in any given puzzle, both in terms of points and in terms of how satisfying it is to find. It has to use every one of the 7 letters at least once, center letter included, but there's no requirement about how many times each letter shows up beyond that minimum of one. A word that happens to use each of the 7 letters exactly once, with no repeats at all, is sometimes called a perfect pangram, a slightly rarer and more elegant case, but it scores exactly the same as any other pangram of the same length. Most puzzles have at least one pangram; a small number have more than one, and very rarely a puzzle might have none, though that's unusual by design. Once you've entered your letters into the solver, sorting by "Pangrams first" or ticking the "Pangrams only" filter is the fastest way to check whether you've already found every one for that puzzle.

Ranks explained

Beyond the raw point total, many versions of this puzzle assign a rank based on how close your score is to the maximum possible score for that day's specific 7 letters (the maximum changes daily, since it depends entirely on how many valid words those particular letters can form). Ranks typically run on a scale similar to this, from lowest to highest:

• Beginner: roughly the first few percent of the maximum score, just enough to get on the board.
• Good Start / Moving Up: early-to-mid range scores, showing steady progress through the easier finds.
• Good, Solid, Nice, Great, Amazing: a run of mid-to-upper tiers as your score climbs toward the maximum.
• Genius: a widely recognized milestone, usually reached somewhere around 70% of the maximum possible score.
• Queen Bee: the top rank, awarded only for finding every single valid word in that day's puzzle, pangrams included.

A short worked round

Picture a puzzle with the letters D, I, L, N, O, R, T and center letter I. A reasonable opening round might turn up "TOLD", "TOIL", "TROD", and "DIRT", four solid but unremarkable 4-point words. Digging further might surface "TRIO", "IDOL", and the slightly trickier "LOIN". A patient run through longer combinations eventually turns up "TAILOR"... except there's no A in this set, so that one's a trap, a good reminder to always check every letter of a candidate word against the actual 7 you were given, not against a word that merely feels plausible. This is exactly the kind of puzzle where a handful of less obvious mid-length words are still waiting once the first, most obvious batch runs out, which is why running the letters through the solver tends to turn up more than a quick manual scan does.

How this differs from a plain anagram solver

An anagram solver takes a fixed set of letters and rearranges all of them into a new word, using each letter exactly once. Spelling Bee is a different kind of puzzle entirely: you're not rearranging a fixed set, you're building words of varying length from a pool of 7 letters where repeats are allowed and not every letter has to be used in every word. That's why the solver on this site works the way it does, checking each dictionary word against the rule "does this word use only these letters, with the center letter present, repeats allowed" rather than trying to permute a fixed 7-letter string.