How to play Letter Hive

Seven letters in a honeycomb. Spell every word you can find, always using the centre letter. One fresh hive every day.

Letter Hive is a word-finding puzzle. Seven letters sit in a honeycomb with one of them in the centre, and you find as many words as you can from them.

What counts as a word

A word counts if it is at least four letters long, uses the centre letter, and uses only the seven letters on the board.

You may reuse any letter as often as you like. That is the rule people forget and it opens the puzzle up enormously — a hive containing L, O and P will take LOLL, POOL and LOLLOP, not just the words that use each letter once.

Because there is no restriction on repeats, a single hive typically holds forty or fifty valid answers.

How scoring works in Letter Hive

A four-letter word scores one point. Anything longer scores one point for every letter, so a seven-letter word is worth seven.

A pangram — a word using all seven letters at once — scores its length plus a bonus of seven. Every hive is built to contain at least one, and the generator proves that before the puzzle ships, so hunting for one is never wasted effort.

Your total climbs a rank ladder running from Beginner through Solid, Strong, Great and Expert to Genius. The progress bar shows what the next rank needs.

No S

No hive ever contains the letter S.

This is deliberate and it changes how you should search. Without an S, plurals and third-person verbs are off the table entirely, which removes the cheapest possible way to double a word list and forces the puzzle to be about actual vocabulary. If you find yourself trying to remember whether a plural counts, it does not — there is no S to make one with.

How to search a hive properly

Scanning for words at random gets you to Solid and then stalls. Two systematic approaches get further.

The first is to work through prefixes. Take the centre letter with each outer letter in turn and try building from that pair, then swap the order. Most missing words are ordinary ones sitting behind a combination you simply have not tried.

The second is to work through word shapes rather than words. Ask which letters could plausibly double, which pairs make common endings, and whether any of the letters form a familiar chunk — ING, ENT, ATE, OON, ELL. Then test those chunks against the centre letter.

For the pangram, start from the rarest letter on the board. A hive with a V, K, or W almost always builds its pangram around it, and there are far fewer places that letter can sit.

How the daily hive is built

One shared puzzle per day, unlocking at midnight, with a streak for consecutive days and a spoiler-free share showing the rank you reached rather than the words you found.

Shuffle rearranges the outer letters without changing the puzzle. It helps more than it sounds like it should — a fresh arrangement genuinely surfaces combinations your eye had stopped seeing.

Controls

Tap a hexagon to add its letter, or type on your keyboard.

Keyboard

Enter submits the word, Backspace deletes a letter, Escape clears the whole entry.
Every control is reachable with Tab.

Shuffle

Shuffle rearranges the six outer letters; the centre letter never moves.

Strategy tips

Remember letters repeat. Words like LOLL, ODDER and POPPED are legal and they are the ones most people never think to try.
Hunt the pangram from the rarest letter. A V, K or W has very few places it can sit, and every hive is guaranteed to contain a pangram.
Work pairs systematically. Take the centre letter with each outer letter in turn, both ways round, and build from there rather than waiting for words to occur to you.
Stop looking for plurals. No hive contains an S, so every word has to earn its place on its own rather than by adding one.
Chase length once you have the easy words. Four-letter words score one point each while a seven-letter word scores seven, so one long find is worth seven short ones.
Try familiar chunks against the centre letter — ING, ENT, ATE, ELL, OON. Word shapes surface answers faster than word meanings.
Shuffle when you stall. The arrangement really does change what your eye groups together, and it costs nothing.
Come back later rather than grinding. Hives reward a fresh look far more than they reward persistence, and the rank ladder is there all day.