The New York Times Spelling Bee for Monday, May 25, 2026 is one of those puzzles that looks generous on the surface and then quietly tightens around you. Seven letters, one pangram, forty-three valid words, and a center letter that refuses to let anything slide. By the time most solvers reach the five-letter tier, the grid stops feeling like a coffee-break warm-up and starts behaving like a vocabulary audit.
Today’s NYT Spelling Bee Hive: May 25, 2026
Today’s letters are A, I, M, N, R, V and T, with T locked in as the mandatory center letter. Every accepted answer must use it. That single constraint is doing most of the heavy lifting today, because the moment you remove T from the alphabet, the hive collapses. There is no escaping the center, and the puzzle is engineered around that gravitational pull.
The puzzle contains 43 valid words and a Queen Bee ceiling that rewards a willingness to dig past the obvious. There is exactly one pangram, three eight-letter words, and a single nine-letter word that most solvers will either find immediately or never find at all.
Today’s Spelling Bee Pangram
The pangram for Monday is VARMINT. It is a word most American readers recognize instantly, an informal noun for a troublesome or objectionable animal, often used in the rural Western vernacular and immortalized by enough cartoon antagonists to feel like a gimme. It is not. Solvers consistently report missing VARMINT because the V sits visually isolated in the hive and the eye drifts past it. If you found VARIANT and VITAMIN and stopped there, you left the seven-plus-seven bonus on the table.
Spelling Bee Hints for May 25, 2026
The puzzle’s structural logic is straightforward once you see it. The letter set is consonant-heavy, the vowels are limited to A and I, and the center letter T creates a forest of TR-, TA- and TI- openings while simultaneously enabling the doubled-T endings that pepper the answer list. Solvers who methodically work through TR, TA, TI, AT, IT, AN, MA, RA and VA prefixes will surface most of the puzzle inside fifteen minutes. The pangram requires looking at the hive from the V side rather than the T side, which is the single most useful piece of advice for cracking the Genius threshold on a day like this.
Full NYT Spelling Bee Answer List: May 25, 2026
Here is the breakdown that matters.
4-Letter Words
The four-letter floor is brisk and unforgiving. ANTI, MART, MINT, MITT, RANT, TART, TINT, TRAM and TRIM are the entry points, and most experienced players will clear this tier inside two minutes. TINT and MITT are the kind of doubled-consonant traps the Spelling Bee leans on when it wants to nudge your score into Good before you have even started thinking.
5-Letter Words
The five-letter tier is where the puzzle starts whispering. ATRIA, the plural of atrium and a word that moonlights in both architecture and cardiology, is the kind of answer that splits solvers into two camps. ATTAR, the essential oil distilled from rose petals, is older, more obscure, and a recurring guest in NYT puzzles dating back to its print-crossword era. MANTA, TAINT, TIARA, TITAN, TRAIN and TRAIT round out the level, with RAITA, the Indian yogurt condiment, sitting in as the puzzle’s first deliberate global-pantry inclusion.
6-Letter Words
The six-letter tier is where the grid earns its difficulty. ARRANT, an archaic intensifier meaning utter or downright, is the sort of word that lives almost exclusively inside phrases like “arrant nonsense” and rarely surfaces anywhere else. NATANT, a botany and zoology term meaning floating or swimming, is the kind of entry that exists almost solely to humble the Hivemind. TAMARI, TANNIN, TANTRA, RATTAN, TARTAN, TARTAR and TATAMI cluster the rest of the level into a small geography lesson of Japanese flooring, Indian philosophy, Scottish weaving and Mongol cavalry. MARTIN is both a bird and a name, MANTRA is the Sanskrit chant turned self-help marketing slogan, AVATAR has been pulled out of its Hindu origins and into James Cameron’s gravitational orbit, and TRIVIA is the easiest six-letter word in the set, hiding behind a vowel sequence most solvers scan past on the first sweep. ATTAIN rounds out the tier as the cleanest verb in the group.
7-Letter Words
The seven-letter tier is the pangram zone, but it is not only the pangram. MARTINI, RATATAT, TAMARIN, TANTARA, VARIANT and VITAMIN sit alongside VARMINT and together they form the spine of the puzzle’s scoring run. TAMARIN, the small New World monkey, is the most obscure of the group and the one most likely to be overlooked. TANTARA, an old word for the blast of a trumpet or hunting horn, is genuinely rare. RATATAT is onomatopoeia, accepted by the Bee but missed often enough that it deserves a mention.
8-Letter Words
The eight-letter tier delivers three of the day’s most satisfying answers. IRRITANT is the most accessible. MAINTAIN is hiding in plain sight, a high-frequency English verb that most solvers walk past three or four times before they see it. TRIMARAN, the three-hulled sailing vessel, is the sneakiest, and the one that separates solid scores from Genius scores. If you have not been keeping the maritime vocabulary file open, TRIMARAN is the word that will cost you the rank.
9-Letter Word
And then there is INVARIANT. Nine letters. The longest answer in the puzzle. A mathematical and linguistic term meaning unchanging under specified transformations, used heavily in physics, computer science, and formal logic. INVARIANT is either the first word a solver finds or the last, and the gap between those two outcomes is what determines the final score for most players today.
Edge Cases and Tricky Words to Watch
A few words worth flagging for the puzzle’s edge cases. TARTAR is accepted, despite its political and historical sensitivities in modern usage, because the Bee continues to list it as a culinary and dental term. AVATAR has been a Bee staple since the puzzle launched. TANNIN, the polyphenol responsible for the dry mouth feel of red wine and over-steeped tea, is the kind of crossover vocabulary that rewards readers who follow both food writing and chemistry. NATANT is the trapdoor.
How Today’s Puzzle Fits the May 2026 Pattern
For context on how Monday’s grid fits into the broader May 2026 pattern, the month has trended toward compact letter sets with one or two pangrams and an obscure outlier word designed to gatekeep Queen Bee. Today’s edition follows that template precisely. The NYT Spelling Bee was created by Frank Longo, has been edited daily by Sam Ezersky since 2018, and resets every morning at 3 a.m. Eastern as part of the New York Times Games subscription suite alongside Wordle, Connections, Strands and the Mini Crossword.
The Bottom Line on Monday’s Spelling Bee
If you cleared the grid today without help, INVARIANT and TRIMARAN are the two words that almost certainly carried you to Genius. If you missed them, the path back runs through TR- prefixes and the maritime corner of your vocabulary. Monday’s puzzle is the kind that rewards patience over pattern recognition, and a willingness to look at the hive sideways instead of straight on. Tuesday’s grid arrives at 3 a.m. Eastern.
