Tuesday’s New York Times Spelling Bee for May 26, 2026 looks deceptively soft on the surface, the kind of hive a commuter clears between subway stops, and then quietly hardens into one of the week’s more disciplined vocabulary tests once the four-letter floor runs dry. The honeycomb is built on seven letters, A, B, C, E, I, K and L, with L locked in as the mandatory center letter. Every accepted answer must contain it, and that single rule does almost all of the work today, because the moment L is removed from the grid, the puzzle quietly collapses.
Today’s NYT Spelling Bee at a Glance, May 26, 2026
- Center letter: L
- Outer letters: A, B, C, E, I, K
- Pangram: CLICKABLE
- Total words: 46
- Total points (Queen Bee): 217
- Genius threshold: 152 points
- Bingo: Yes
Today’s edition contains 46 valid words, exactly one pangram, and a maximum Queen Bee score of 217 points. The pangram is CLICKABLE, a nine-letter adjective that has slipped from internet jargon into mainstream English over the last two decades and now appears in everything from product copy to academic writing. It is the longest word on the board, the most generous payout, and the structural anchor that links the consonant-heavy left side of the hive to the softer vowel cluster on the right.
Today’s Spelling Bee Pangram, May 26, 2026
The single pangram in Tuesday’s hive is:
- CLICKABLE (9 letters, 16 points)
Full NYT Spelling Bee Answers Today, May 26, 2026
Below is the verified, complete answer list for today’s NYT Spelling Bee, organized from longest to shortest. Every word on this list uses the required center letter L, and letters may be reused freely.
9 Letters (1 word, the pangram)
- CLICKABLE
8 Letters (3 words)
- BILLABLE
- CALLABLE
- LIKEABLE
7 Letters (2 words)
- LIBELEE
- LIKABLE
6 Letters (9 words)
- ALLELE
- BABBLE
- CABBIE
- CACKLE
- CELIAC
- ICICLE
- KIBBLE
- LABILE
- LIABLE
5 Letters (12 words)
- ALIKE
- BABEL
- BELIE
- BELLE
- BIBLE
- BLEAK
- CABLE
- CELEB
- CELLI
- KEBAB
- LABEL
- LIBEL
4 Letters (19 words)
- ABLE
- BABE
- BAKE
- BALE
- BEAK
- BECK
- BELL
- BIKE
- BILE
- CAKE
- CELL
- KALE
- KEEL
- LACE
- LAKE
- LEAK
- LEEK
- LICE
- LIKE
How the Tiers Break Down
The four-letter tier is the warm-up, and today it is gentler than Monday’s T-centered grid was. ABLE, BABE, BAKE, BALE, BEAK, BECK, BELL, BIKE, BILE, CAKE, CELL, KALE, KEEL, LACE, LAKE, LEAK, LEEK, LICE and LIKE form the entry rung. Most solvers will clear this tier inside three minutes. The doubled-consonant traps, BELL and CELL, are the kind of low-friction fills the Bee uses to nudge a score from Good Start into Moving Up before the player has even committed to the puzzle. BECK is the only mild outlier, an older noun for a small stream that still lives in British English and surfaces in NYT puzzles often enough to be worth remembering.
The five-letter tier is where the puzzle starts to whisper. ALIKE, BABEL, BELIE, BELLE, BIBLE, BLEAK, CABLE, CELEB, CELLI, KEBAB, LABEL and LIBEL form a tight cluster of common English nouns and verbs, with two quiet gatekeepers. CELLI, the plural of cello, is the kind of music-theory answer the Bee leans on when it wants to thin the Queen Bee field, and BELIE, meaning to contradict or misrepresent, is a verb most solvers recognize but rarely produce on demand. BABEL, with its biblical and idiomatic weight, is the highest-value cultural touchstone in this row, and it tends to come fastest to readers who think in proper nouns first and common nouns second.
The six-letter tier is where Tuesday quietly tightens. ALLELE, BABBLE, CABBIE, CACKLE, CELIAC, ICICLE, KIBBLE, LABILE and LIABLE form a row that rewards readers across genetics, medicine, dog ownership, weather observation and contract law. ALLELE is the genetics term for one of two or more alternative forms of a gene, the kind of word that lives at the intersection of high-school biology and Sunday-puzzle vocabulary. CELIAC, referring to the autoimmune disorder triggered by gluten, has migrated from medical journals to grocery aisles over the past fifteen years, and the Bee now treats it as standard. LABILE, meaning emotionally unstable or chemically prone to change, is the puzzle’s quiet Queen Bee gatekeeper this round, the kind of word that separates the Genius tier from the Queen Bee tier on a board that otherwise behaves itself.
The seven-letter tier holds only two answers, LIBELEE and LIKABLE. LIBELEE, the legal term for a person against whom a libel claim is filed, is the obscure one, and it will cost most casual players a Queen Bee crown today. LIKABLE is the soft landing, a word most readers spell automatically until the moment they are asked to find it inside a constrained grid. The eight-letter tier expands the pool with BILLABLE, CALLABLE and LIKEABLE, all common adjectives anchored in finance, telecom and personality respectively. BILLABLE and CALLABLE share a double-L spine that makes them easier to spot once the solver starts thinking in suffixes rather than roots.
Then comes the pangram. CLICKABLE is a nine-letter adjective describing any digital element that can be activated by a mouse pointer or touchscreen tap. The word is now so embedded in product design, advertising copy and user-experience writing that most English speakers under forty encounter it weekly. Inside the hive, it is the highest-scoring single answer of the day, worth sixteen points, nine for the length plus the seven-point pangram bonus. Solvers who find it early can build a path to Genius without needing every six-letter word, but those who miss it lose the cushion that makes Queen Bee comfortably reachable.
Patterns That Unlock the Board
For solvers chasing the full sweep, a few patterns help. The double-B family, BABBLE, KIBBLE and BABEL, all sit close together on the keyboard and tend to surface in the same scan. The double-L family, ALLELE, BELLE, BILLABLE, CALLABLE and CELL, rewards anyone who tries every letter twice before moving on. The -ABLE suffix carries enormous weight today, anchoring CABLE, LIABLE, LIKABLE, LIKEABLE, BILLABLE, CALLABLE and the pangram CLICKABLE. Solvers who recognize that one suffix early will unlock close to half the board in a single pass.
The May 2026 Spelling Bee calendar has trended toward compact letter sets with one strong pangram, a single obscure gatekeeper word and a generous middle tier. Today’s grid sits squarely inside that template. Last week’s VARMINT puzzle on Monday was tighter and meaner. The Tuesday board is friendlier, but it is engineered to punish anyone who stops scanning at the six-letter tier. Comparing today’s letter distribution to last Wednesday’s three-pangram ABRACADABRA grid shows how dramatically the Bee can swing in a single seven-day window.
The New York Times Spelling Bee was created by puzzle constructor Frank Longo and is now edited daily by Sam Ezersky, who has stewarded the puzzle since its 2018 launch as a standalone digital title inside the broader NYT Games ecosystem. A fresh puzzle drops every day at 3 a.m. Eastern Time on the official puzzle platform, and full access requires an active NYT Games subscription. The mobile version, available through the NYT Games app, tracks streaks, ranks and Queen Bee history across devices, which is the most reliable way to measure long-term improvement.
For readers who want to compare today’s solve against the rest of the puzzle desk’s coverage, Tuesday’s Connections grid, Tuesday’s Wordle answer, Tuesday’s Strands board, and Tuesday’s Mini Crossword are all part of the same daily rotation, and the patterns across the four games often illuminate each other. The Spelling Bee tends to reward vocabulary depth, the Connections tests lateral pattern recognition, the Wordle measures deductive economy, and the Mini Crossword rewards cultural recall. Solving all four in a single morning is the closest thing the NYT Games suite offers to a complete cognitive workout.
The Queen Bee path on Tuesday, May 26, 2026 requires finding all 46 words, which means clearing the four-letter floor in full, capturing every six-letter answer including LABILE, picking up both seven-letter words including LIBELEE, securing all three eight-letter answers, and landing the CLICKABLE pangram. Anyone who reaches 152 points has crossed Genius. Anyone who clears the full sweep has earned the bee. Wednesday’s grid arrives at 3 a.m. Eastern, and the next puzzle’s full breakdown will be posted before the morning’s first cup of coffee cools.
