Spelling Bee answers archive

October 2026 (19)

September 2026 (30)

Size of a day: 18 to 79 words

The smallest hive in the window, 22 September (centre N, outer O Q U X E I), had 18 words. The largest, 20 September (centre H, outer A C E I L T), had 79. The median day had 47. Points for Queen Bee ranged from 60 on 9 September to 431 on 27 September, with an average of about 222.

Since Genius is 70% of the maximum, the score needed for Genius swung from roughly 42 points to roughly 302 across these 40 days. A score that would be Genius on a small day is barely a start on a big one, which is why each day page shows the maximum.

Largest and smallest hives

The six largest days by word count (two tied at 66) and the five smallest:

The two lists look different at a glance. Three of the six largest hives carried three vowels in the outer ring, and five of the six had E among the outer letters. The smallest days leaned on letters that pair badly: Q and X on 22 September, and a single outer vowel on 15 September, with C G I N P R around an M.

One pangram is normal; four happened three times

Twenty-five of the 40 days had a single pangram, eleven had two, one had three (13 September: ANTIOXIDANT, OXIDANT, OXIDATION) and three had four: 19 September (BILTONG, BLOTTING, BOLTING, BOTTLING), 27 September (NULLIFIED, UNFILED, UNFILLED, UNFULFILLED) and 9 October (GENTILITY, INTELLIGENTLY, NEGLIGENTLY, TELLINGLY). That is 62 pangrams in all.

Multi-pangram days tend to share a stem. On 19 September three of the four ended in -ING and the fourth, BILTONG, used the same seven letters without the suffix. On 27 September three were built on FILL or FILE. On 9 October three ended in -LY. When you find one pangram, try its suffixed and prefixed relatives before you go back to four-letter words.

Pangram lengths

Of the 62 pangrams, 16 used each of the seven letters exactly once, which makes them seven letters long. The rest repeated at least one letter. The full spread, with examples from the window:

On 25 of the 40 days the longest word on the list was a pangram, or tied with one. If you have found a long word that is not a pangram, there is a fair chance something longer is still hiding, and it probably uses all seven letters.

• 7 letters: 16 (PURLOIN, EQUINOX, MACHINE)
• 8 letters: 21 (TAILWIND, ANALYZED, AROMATIC)
• 9 letters: 10 (CHICKADEE, IMPARTIAL, JELLYBEAN)
• 10 letters: 6 (NICKNAMING, FACILITATE, DIZZYINGLY)
• 11 letters: 6 (TELEKINETIC, ANTIOXIDANT, HONEYMOONED)
• 12 letters: 2 (NONCONDUCTOR, BACCHANALIAN)
• 13 letters: 1 (INTELLIGENTLY)

Centre letters in the window

P, I and N were the centre letter four times each; A, T, M and C three times; F, B, G, H and V twice; and D, R, U, K, O and Y once. A vowel sat in the centre on 9 of the 40 days. Y took the centre once, on 9 October, and that day produced four pangrams.

The hub says a vowel centre tends to mean a longer list. In this window the effect was real but small: the nine vowel-centre days averaged about 49 words, the thirty-one consonant-centre days about 46. The harder consonants did shrink the list. The single K-centre day (11 September) had 26 words, and the two V-centre days had 32 and 24.

Centre letter alone did not decide the day. The four N-centre days ranged from 18 words (22 September) to 60 (8 October), so read all seven letters before guessing how big a day it will be.

Never an S

Not one of the 40 hives contained S, which matches the rule described on the hub. With no S on offer, there are no -S plurals to find, so plural-pangram hunting is wasted effort.

The outer ring usually carried two or three vowels (18 and 15 days). Five days had one. One day, 22 September, had four (O, U, E, I), and it was also the smallest list of the window. One day, 23 September, had none in the outer ring at all, just D G L N Y Z around an I, and it still produced the pangram DIZZYINGLY.

The number of outer vowels made almost no difference to the size of the list. Days with one outer vowel averaged about 46 words, days with two about 47.5, and days with three about 47.7. The letters themselves mattered far more: the four-vowel day had only 18 words because its consonants were N, Q and X.

Counting the one-point words

Across the window, 609 of the 1,861 words were four letters long, almost exactly a third. They are worth one point each, so they carry far more of the count than of the score. A day where you have found most of the long words but few of the short ones can look further from Genius by count than it really is by points.

The reverse also holds. On big days like 27 September, the long words do the heavy lifting: the four pangrams alone, each scoring its length plus seven, were worth 63 points, as much as 63 four-letter words. If you are stalled on a big day, a second pangram is worth more than ten four-letter words.

At the other end, 188 words in the window ran to eight letters or more. They are where most of the points sit, and they are the words people miss because they rarely come to mind unprompted. A suffix sweep finds a surprising share of them.

Five drills with past hives

Old hives make good practice because the letters are fixed and the full list is one click away. A few routines that build specific skills:

• Pangram sprint. Read only the seven letters from a day's summary row, give yourself two minutes, and write every pangram you can find. Then check the day page. The three four-pangram days above are the best test.
• Rare-letter day. Replay 22 September (Q and X in the ring) or 4 September (Z) and see how many words you can find before looking. Rare letters shrink the list, but they also hide the words people miss.
• Suffix sweep. Pick a day, find ten words, then add -ED, -ER, -ING, -Y or -LY to each where the letters allow. Compare against the full list to see how many the sweep would have caught.
• Four-letter grid. Run each consonant through the common four-letter patterns, as the hub suggests, and count how close you get to that day's four-letter total.
• Genius check. Note the maximum, work out 70% of it, and play until you cross it without opening the list.

Reading a day page from here

Each date in the list leads to one page with the hive drawn at the top beside the word count, pangram count and maximum points, then the pangrams, then every word grouped by length with a count for each length. If you only want the pangram, stop reading at the top. If you want to go back to a day you played but didn't finish, the length groups make it easy to see which sizes you missed.

Each day page also notes that the Times does not publish its word list. For the 40 days in this window, our count matched the count in the puzzle's own data every time, so you can treat the totals on these pages as the ones you are playing against.