Spelling Bee Answers Today (October 19, 2026)

Scoring and ranks

Every rank is a percentage of the day's maximum, so the same rank needs more points on a rich hive than a sparse one. The game's rules: four-letter words score one point; longer words score one point per letter; a pangram — a word using all seven letters — scores its length plus seven. The example below is the hive for 2 September 2026, which had 31 words worth 138 points.

What the list accepts

The rules are short and come from the game's How to Play panel: words must be four letters or longer, must include the centre letter, may use any letter as many times as needed, and the list leaves out words that are obscure, hyphenated or proper nouns — and swear words. Within those rules the editor's choices are visible in the answers. In the 40 hives from 1 September to 10 October 2026 the list accepted NAAN, ACAI, ROMCOM and TELEHEALTH, and rejected HAHA, TATA, CAIRO and the British ANAEMIC even when every letter was on the board.

The list at the top of this page is not a reconstruction: it is the answer list the game itself loads for the day, and the count, pangrams and maximum are computed from it with the game's scoring. If you think the Times has missed a word, the game's own panel gives an address for that: buzzwords@nytimes.com.

Reaching Genius by hand

The technique, in the order it earns points:

• Find the pangram first. It is worth the most and it is the most constrained: look for endings the hive can spell (-ING, -TION, -ED) and for the rarest letter, which must be in it.
• Take every four-letter word you can see. They are one point each and averaged 15 a day in our window, and they are words everyone knows.
• Extend what you have. Every word you find is a possible stem: try -ED, -ING, -ER and -Y, and re-check against the hive's letters. In our window about one word in ten was a stem plus one of those endings.
• Try each letter as a starter. Systematically run the seven letters as first letters and let common patterns suggest words; this finds the five- and six-letter words that scanning misses.
• Reuse letters deliberately. Doubles and repeats are legal and are where points hide: KNEECAPPED, NULLIFIED and UNFULFILLED were all accepted in the window.

How the hive is built

The Times hasn't published how it chooses each hive beyond the promise of at least one pangram, but 40 hives show the shape. None contained an S, so plurals never arise; none contained all five vowels; and the day's list ran from 18 words (22 September, the EQUINOX hive) to 79 (20 September). A day had one pangram 25 times, two 11 times, three once and four three times, and 14 hives had a pangram that used each letter exactly once. The centre letter is gold in the hive at the top of the page; in our window a vowel centre did not reliably mean a longer list (49 words on average, against 46 for consonant centres).

The absence of S has a knock-on effect worth knowing: because plurals are off the table, inflections and compounds carry more of the list — DEFUNDED, VEGGING, COATROOM — and any stem you find should be run through the endings the hive allows.

Reading today's list

The list is grouped by length with pangrams highlighted, and the grouping matches how points are distributed. Four-letter words are a point each; in our window they were about a third of each day's words but under a tenth of its points. Five- and six-letter words carry the bulk of the score, and seven-plus words, including the pangram, are few and worth the most. A player at Amazing who wants Genius needs another fifth of the maximum, which on a 222-point day — the window's average — is about 44 points: seven six-letter words, or a pangram and a few more. The list tells you at a glance which lengths you have exhausted and which still hold words.

The count beside the hive is the number of words on the Times' list for the day, so it matches the game's own total. If a word you tried is missing here, the game rejected it too.

About the answers, and the rest of the Times games

The hive and its answer list are captured from the game's page data after the 3 a.m. Eastern release, and the pangrams and points are computed from that list — all by the pipeline on the editorial policy page. The Spelling Bee solver runs a different, broader dictionary search on any hive you type in, and the Spelling Bee guide covers the technique in depth. Every past hive is in the archive. The other Times games — Connections, Wordle, Strands — change at your local midnight and have their own daily pages.

The words the Times will not take, in categories

When a word you try gets "Not in word list", it usually falls into one of a few buckets. Each bucket below has an example the game rejected in the 40 hives from 1 September to 10 October 2026, on a day when every letter was available:

• Proper nouns, even lower-cased — CAIRO and ARAMAIC (10 October), ANNIE (8 October).
• Words the editor considers obscure — Latin and technical forms such as ACTA and AMIC (10 October).
• Swear words — the How to Play panel says it plainly: "No cussing either, sorry."
• British spellings and variants — ANAEMIC was rejected on 8 October while ANEMIC was accepted; PILAFF and TIFFIN were rejected on 2 September.
• Hyphenated forms — excluded by the stated rules. If you think an ordinary word is missing, the game's address for suggestions is buzzwords@nytimes.com.

A pangram-first day, described

Take the hive from 10 October 2026: centre letter C, outer letters A, I, M, O, R, T. A player working from the rarest-feeling letters might try -ATIC endings and find AROMATIC — a, r, o, m, a, t, i, c, every one of the seven, and the day's only pangram, worth 15 points. It also opens a family: ATOMIC, ACTOR, TACTIC, TRACTOR, MICRO and MACRO all sit in the same letters. The Times' list that day held 63 words worth 297 points, including COATROOM, MOTORCAR and ROMCOM, and Genius needed 208. The rest of the session is systematic: each letter as a starter, each found word extended, doubles tried — CACAO, COCOA and ROCOCO were all on the list.

Frequently asked questions

Recent Spelling Bee answers

Every past puzzle is in the Spelling Bee archive. New here? Start with the Spelling Bee guide.