Word Hive, the Spelling Bee-Style Puzzle – Play Online for Free

Seven letters in a honeycomb of hexagons, one of them in the middle: from these you form every word you can find, and each one has to use the middle letter. The puzzle comes from the Spelling Bee® of The New York Times, which first ran as a weekly puzzle in the paper's magazine in February 2015. It was created by the puzzle maker Frank Longo at the suggestion of Will Shortz, modeled on the Polygon puzzle of the British Times, and since May 2018 a new one has appeared online every day. The name is a play on words: in America a spelling bee first means a spelling contest for schoolchildren, like the Scripps National Spelling Bee held since 1925, where "bee" stands for a gathering, and the honeycomb board picks up the double meaning.

Our Word Hive is an independent version with its own English word list and has no connection with The New York Times. You need no account and no app, and a new puzzle is ready whenever you want one.

Seven Letters, One Center: Rules and Tricks for Word Hive

The honeycomb shows seven letters, a green one in the middle and six around it. Click them or type them on your keyboard, confirm with "Enter", and every valid word goes into your list. The rules:

• At least four letters: shorter words do not count, and there is no upper limit.
• The center is a must: the green letter has to be in every word, the others are up to you. Every letter may be used more than once, so N, O and E also make NONE.
• Which words count: common English words in American spelling, in all their forms, so plurals and verb forms like PLANTS, PLANTED and PLANTING are fine. Proper nouns, abbreviations and hyphenated words are not accepted.
• Points: a four-letter word earns one point, and every longer word as many points as it has letters. Use all seven letters in one word and you have found a pangram, worth seven bonus points; every puzzle has at least one.
• Ranks: your points take you up nine ranks from Beginner to Genius, measured against all the points the puzzle holds. Find every last word and the game crowns you Queen Bee.
• Help: "Shuffle" or the space bar rearranges the outer letters while the center stays put. "Answers" reveals all the words after asking once and shows the ones you missed in gray. "New Puzzle" brings seven fresh letters, and an unfinished honeycomb stays saved in your browser.
• Different from the original: The New York Times almost always leaves out the S, so plurals do not make the puzzle too easy. Here any letter can turn up, and plurals count.

With no clock running, the first words usually come quickly. The last points take some method:

• Hunt for the pangram: it earns the most points at once. Look for long words that combine many different letters, often words with a prefix or an ending like ING or ED.
• Use every word twice: once you have found PLANT, try PLANTS and PLANTED right away. The longer forms are worth more points.
• Run through the endings: if the hive holds E and D, past forms in ED are worth a look; with I, N and G, every verb can become an ING word.
• Dare double letters: words like BALLOON, COFFEE or LITTLE need fewer different letters than their length suggests.
• Collect the short words: they bring only one point each, but you need them all for Queen Bee. Pair the center letter with each of its neighbors in turn.
• Shuffle against tunnel vision: when nothing more comes to mind, rearrange the letters. A different order often brings out words you did not notice before.

More Honey for Word Lovers: Five Other Puzzles

When the honeycomb has been picked clean, these games are waiting for you:

• Guess the Word: rather than collecting many words, you track down a single one in six tries, and green, blue and gray tiles show how close you are after each guess.
• Crossword: short clues lead to the answers, and every word you enter gives you letters for its neighbors across and down.
• Arrowword: every clue is printed inside the grid, little arrows point the way, and at the end the marked squares reveal a secret word.
• Hangman: you uncover a hidden word letter by letter, while every wrong guess makes the drawing on the gallows grow.
• Word Search: the list of words is right there, yet each one is buried among rows of letters. Search carefully and cross them off one after another.