Spelling Bee solver
Put the centre letter in the amber box and the other six beside it. Every word here is at least four letters, contains the centre letter, and uses nothing outside your seven. Pangrams are marked, because those are the ones worth the extra seven points.
- +7 points
- The pangram bonus, on top of one point per letter
- 1 point
- What a four-letter word scores. Everything longer scores its length
- No tiles
- Letters repeat as often as you like, unlike every other tool here
Repeating letters change the problem completely
Every other tool on this site works by counting. You have one E, so a word needing two Es is out. It is a subtraction problem and it is what makes a Scrabble rack solvable in a couple of milliseconds.
Spelling Bee removes the counting entirely. There is no limit on how often a letter appears, so the only question is whether every letter of a candidate word is somewhere in your seven. That sounds easier and produces far more results: a good puzzle has fifty or more valid words where a seven-tile Scrabble rack might yield twenty of that length.
It also means the awkward letters matter differently. A puzzle containing a G and an N will be full of -ING words, and one built around a single vowel produces long, strange-looking answers that are nonetheless perfectly valid.
Finding the pangram on purpose
There is always at least one, and hunting for it randomly wastes the most time of anything in this puzzle. Two things narrow it down fast.
First, the pangram has to include your most awkward letter, so start there and ask what words even contain it. Second, seven distinct letters usually means a longer word than seven characters, which points at a compound word or a stem with a prefix or suffix attached.
The solver marks them in amber so you can see the shape of the answer even when you were nowhere near it.
The narrower official list
The puzzle accepts fewer words than we find, because its list is curated for general readers. Treat a long result list as the outer boundary of what is possible rather than a list of guaranteed accepts. More on our word list.
Related puzzles
Different rules, different tool. These are the ones people confuse with Spelling Bee.
Word unscrambler
The tile-counting version. Each letter can be used once, which is what Scrabble, Words With Friends and every jumble puzzle require. Grouped by length with both game scores.
Anagram solver
Every letter used exactly once, no more and no fewer.
Wordle solver
Five letters, filtered by the green, yellow and grey feedback.
Text Twist solver
Three letters and up, tiles counted, for the timed rounds.
About Spelling Bee
How is this different from every other solver here?
Letters repeat. Every other tool on this site counts tiles, because in Scrabble a single E cannot make a word needing two. Spelling Bee has no tiles at all: the seven letters are a palette and you may use any of them as often as you like, so COCOON is fine from just C, O and N.
That makes it a genuinely different search, which is why it has its own page rather than being the unscrambler with a filter on it.
What are the rules exactly?
Four of them. A word must be at least four letters long, it must contain the centre letter, it may only use the seven given letters, and it may reuse them freely. Proper nouns, hyphens and anything with an apostrophe are out, as they are in every word game.
What is a pangram and why does it matter?
A word that uses all seven letters at least once. The puzzle awards seven bonus points for one on top of its normal score, and there is always at least one in a real puzzle. Finding it is usually the difference between a good score and a great one, so the solver flags every pangram it finds.
How does the scoring work?
A four-letter word is worth one point. Anything longer is worth one point per letter, so a seven-letter word is seven. A pangram adds seven on top of that, meaning a seven-letter pangram is worth fourteen.
The solver totals the whole board for you, which tells you what a perfect score would have been.
The puzzle rejected a word this found
The New York Times curates its accepted list, and it is deliberately narrower than a tournament word list. Obscure inflections, dialect words and technical terms are all valid Scrabble words and are routinely not accepted in Spelling Bee.
Our list is the broader one, so treat the results as everything that could be a word rather than everything the puzzle will take.
Any advice for solving it without help?
Work through the letters one at a time as a starting letter, and for each one try the centre letter in every position. Most missed words are ones where the centre letter sits somewhere unexpected.
Then look for the pangram deliberately rather than hoping. Write the seven letters out, notice which are awkward, and ask what shape of word would need all of them. It is usually a compound or a word with a prefix.