Spelling Bee Solver

What this tool does

Short answer: enter the centre letter and the six outer letters above, and every valid word appears instantly, pangrams first. The solver checks a 45,525-word dictionary against the standard Spelling Bee rules: words must be four letters or longer, may only use the seven puzzle letters, may repeat any letter freely, and must include the centre letter at least once.

You get more than a bare list. Results are grouped by length, pangrams are counted and highlighted, and every word is priced with NYT-style scoring, so the tool shows the puzzle’s maximum score and the Genius threshold alongside the words themselves. Tick words off as you find them and the tracker remembers your progress for that puzzle, even after a reload or a shuffle. The address bar updates as you type, so copying the link shares the exact puzzle with anyone.

How it works

Everything runs in your browser. The page fetches our word list once, 45,525 words drawn from the same corpus that powers the rest of the site, then solves locally from that point on. There is no server round trip and no limit on how many puzzles you check. Each letter you change re-solves the whole puzzle in milliseconds.

The algorithm is a single pass with three checks per word. Words shorter than four letters are skipped. Words that never use the centre letter are skipped. Every remaining word is scanned letter by letter against the set of seven allowed letters, and a single foreign letter throws it out. While scanning, the solver also tracks how many distinct puzzle letters the word uses, and if all seven appear the word is flagged as a pangram. This is deliberate brute force: with a fixed dictionary and constant-time set lookups, a full scan is fast enough that anything cleverer would be engineering for its own sake.

Results are sorted pangrams first, then longest to shortest, then alphabetically. Scoring follows the NYT convention. Four-letter words score one point, longer words score one point per letter, and a pangram earns a seven-point bonus on top. Summing every word gives the maximum available score, and the rank ladder from Beginner up to Genius and Queen Bee unlocks at fixed percentages of that maximum, with Genius at 70%. Found words are stored in your browser against a key built from the sorted letters, which is why shuffling the outer ring never loses your ticks.

Worked example: D in the centre, C A N L E S outside

Take a hive with D as the centre letter and C, A, N, L, E and S around it. The solver currently finds 247 valid words in that puzzle, worth 1,092 points in total. Genius unlocks at 765 points, which is 70% of the maximum rounded up.

The pangram is CANDLES, and it sits right at the top of the results. It uses all seven letters at least once, so it scores 14 points: one for each of its 7 letters plus the seven-point bonus. Compare CANCELLED, the longest ordinary word in the list. It earns 9 points from sheer length but never touches S, so there is no bonus. Length pays, and pangrams pay more.

The centre-letter rule does more work than most players realise. The same dictionary contains 265 words of four or more letters built entirely from the outer six letters, and every one of them is invalid here because it never uses the D. CLEANSE is the classic trap: every letter it needs is in the hive, yet it scores nothing.

Move the centre and the game changes. Keep the same seven letters but put S in the middle with C, A, N, D, L and E around it, and the solver now finds 297 valid words worth 1,330 points. Same letters, different puzzle. That is why the tool asks for the centre letter separately instead of taking seven letters in any order.

Strategy tips

• Hunt the pangram first. It is the single most valuable find in any puzzle, and the rarer letters in the hive narrow the candidates quickly. Our Spelling Bee strategy guide covers pangram-hunting in depth.
• Work suffix families. Once a word is on your list, try its -S, -ED, -ER and -ING forms before moving on. In the example above, a single added S turns six-point CANDLE into the pangram, more than doubling its value.
• Respect repeats. Doubled letters are the most common blind spot, because players unconsciously treat each hive letter as single-use. Deliberately try doubling every consonant and vowel in words you have already found.
• Anchor on the centre letter. Every answer contains it, so cycle it through each position: as the first letter, buried in the middle, and at the end. It is a far smaller search space than staring at all seven letters at once.
• Use the solver as a trainer, not an answer sheet. Play your own game first, tick off what you found, then reveal the rest and note the words you keep missing. The pangrams-only filter gives you a nudge without full spoilers.

Related research and guides

• Spelling Bee strategy and pangrams: how to find the pangram first and squeeze every point from the hive.
• How many five-letter words are there? The data behind the word length that dominates modern word games.
• Wordle letter frequency: which letters do the most work, position by position.
• How to solve anagrams: techniques for seeing the words hidden inside a set of letters.