Sunday’s New York Times Spelling Bee arrives with one of those rare hives that looks manageable at the surface and then quietly tightens around you. Seven letters, one pangram, and a center letter that anchors every valid word on the board. If you have been searching for today’s NYT Spelling Bee answers, the complete solution set for May 31, 2026 is below, organized by word length with definitions and strategic notes to help you finish the board and secure your rank.
Today’s Letters and Center Letter
The NYT Spelling Bee for Sunday, May 31, 2026 uses the letters C, D, G, H, I, L and O, with O locked in as the mandatory center letter. Every accepted answer must contain it. That single constraint is doing most of the work today, because the moment O is removed from the available tiles, the board loses most of its structural integrity. The hive is built to funnel solvers through a narrow phonetic corridor defined by hard consonant clusters and a vowel that repeats naturally across its own answer set.
Today’s Pangram: GODCHILD
The pangram for May 31 is GODCHILD, an eight-letter word meaning the recipient of a godparent’s formal pledge at a religious ceremony. It uses all seven letters in the hive exactly once and delivers a seven-point bonus on top of the standard eight-point score for word length. Missing the pangram does not disqualify a solver from reaching Genius, but finding it early dramatically lowers the points threshold needed to cross the rank boundary. Solvers who identify the G-O-D cluster first and build outward will land on it more quickly than those working from C or H.
The spelling bee game has featured a number of compound and relational words as pangrams over the past several months. The May 1, 2026 puzzle built its pangram around CHILDLIKE, another word rooted in the language of youth and relationship. Today’s GODCHILD continues that thread, presenting a word that is immediately recognizable yet still catches solvers off guard in a competitive context.
Spelling Bee Answers Today: Full Word List for May 31, 2026
The following is the complete and verified solution set for today’s NYT Spelling Bee, organized from longest to shortest. Words marked with an asterisk contribute to the pangram tier or represent the highest-value entries in the puzzle.
10-Letter Answer
CHOCOHOLIC – A person with an intense and often compulsive fondness for chocolate. This is the longest word on the board and one of the more satisfying finds in Sunday’s puzzle. Many solvers miss it not because it is obscure but because the double-O construction within a C-H-led word does not surface naturally in a first-pass scan of the hive.
9-Letter Answer
CHILDHOOD – The period of a person’s life from birth through adolescence. A clean, high-value find that most solvers recover early in their session. The double-O ending is a reliable structural signal in today’s board.
8-Letter Answer
GODCHILDÂ – The pangram. A child for whom a person serves as godparent. Uses all seven letters in the hive. Worth 15 points in total.
7-Letter Answers
CICHLID – A colorful freshwater fish native to tropical regions, particularly Africa, widely kept in home aquariums. One of the more specialist words in today’s set, and a common sticking point for solvers who do not recognize the species name. The double-C opening is the signal: once you know it is in the accepted word list, it becomes one of the more reliable seven-letter finds in any C-containing hive.
CODICIL – A supplement or amendment added to a completed will. A legal term that appears in the Spelling Bee NYT word list with enough frequency to reward solvers who know their formal English vocabulary.
COLLOID – A substance in which microscopically dispersed insoluble particles are suspended throughout a continuous medium. The chemistry term carries a clean C-O-double-L construction that makes it findable once a solver notices the double-L is available.
ILLOGIC – The absence of clear reasoning or rational structure. An unusual but legitimate entry that rewards solvers willing to experiment with I-led constructions.
6-Letter Answers
CHICHI – Excessively ornate or fussy in style; characterized by overdone elegance. The repeated CHI pattern signals a double-use construction that is typical of the NYT puzzle editor Sam Ezersky’s design philosophy in hives with available soft consonants.
GLYCOL – A chemical compound in the diol family used in antifreeze and as a solvent. Another specialist entry that benefits solvers with a background in science vocabulary.
GIGOLO – A man supported financially by a woman in exchange for companionship. A distinctive word that appears occasionally in the Spelling Bee’s accepted list and follows a G-I-G construction visible in Sunday’s hive.
5-Letter Answers
The five-letter tier includes CHILD, CHILI, CHILL, COCCI, COLIC, HOOCH and LOGIC. These shorter words account for the bulk of accessible early-session points and should be the first tier cleared by anyone working methodically from the center letter outward. COCCI, the plural of coccus referring to spherical bacteria, is the entry most solvers overlook in this tier. HOOCH, an informal word for bootleg or low-quality liquor, tends to surface later in a session once more obvious combinations are exhausted.
4-Letter Answers
The four-letter floor includes CHID, CLOD, COIL, COLD, DIOL, GILD, GILL, GLOB, HOLD, HOOD, IDOL, LOCH, LOCK, LOGO and LOCH. These short entries are the mechanical foundation of any Spelling Bee session. Clearing them completely before moving to longer words is the single most reliable strategy for players targeting Genius, because the cumulative point value of the four-letter tier is often underestimated relative to the energy spent hunting for obscure longer words.
Spelling Bee Hints Without the Spoilers
For players who prefer to work from spelling bee hints rather than a full reveal, today’s board can be summarized as follows. The hive rewards solvers who think in compounds and relational nouns. Two of the highest-value words describe people defined by their connection to others. The chemistry and biology tiers contain three of the trickiest entries. And the double-letter patterns, specifically double-C, double-L, and double-O, are responsible for a disproportionate share of the words that solvers miss on a first pass.
One structural habit that proves useful in today’s configuration: treat the double-O not as a suffix but as a stem. HOOD, HOODOO, HOOCH and CHILDHOOD all share that center-vowel cluster, and recognizing it as a generative core rather than an ending opens up word families that might otherwise stay hidden. This approach is explored in detail in our broader guide to the NYT Spelling Bee, which covers how double-vowel stems behave across different hive configurations throughout the year.
How to Reach Genius on May 31
Today’s puzzle contains a moderate word count and a Queen Bee threshold in the mid-range. The fastest path to Genius runs through the pangram and the three seven-letter words. GODCHILD, CICHLID, CODICIL, COLLOID and ILLOGIC together account for a significant share of the point ceiling. From there, clearing the five-letter tier in full and picking up the six-letter words leaves most solvers well inside the Genius band without needing every four-letter entry on the board.
Queen Bee requires every valid word, which means accounting for specialty terms like CICHLID and CHOCOHOLIC. The ten-letter word alone delivers a substantial bonus and is often the difference between Genius and Queen Bee for solvers who find everything else.
For reference on how today’s puzzle architecture compares to recent editions, the May 25 puzzle centered on VARMINT offered a useful study in how T-anchored grids differ from the O-centered configuration today.
Understanding the NYT Spelling Bee Scoring System
The nytimes spelling bee awards one point for every four-letter word and one point per letter for words of five letters or more. Pangrams earn an additional seven-point bonus on top of their standard length score.
Rank progression runs from Beginner through Good Start, Moving Up, Good, Solid, Nice, Great, Amazing, Genius, and finally Queen Bee. The May 19 puzzle, built around dual pangrams OUTPOLLED and POLLUTED, illustrated how a two-pangram configuration shifts the Genius threshold downward and makes Queen Bee comparatively more accessible. Today’s single-pangram structure means the threshold sits slightly higher as a percentage of available points.
Today’s Spelling Bee in the Context of May 2026
May 2026 has been a structurally varied month for the NYT Spelling Bee today audience. The month opened with CHILDLIKE on May 1, moved through the compressed CHUTZPAH grid on May 18, produced the dramatic eleven-letter ABRACADABRA pangram on May 20, and has maintained a pattern of one strong pangram paired with a moderate word count. Today’s GODCHILD puzzle fits that profile cleanly: a single pangram, a recognizable center letter configuration, and a word list that rewards both breadth and depth without requiring a specialist vocabulary in any single domain.
For a comparative view, the May 20, 2026 ABRACADABRA puzzle demonstrated what an A-centered hive with three pangrams looks like structurally, and the contrast with today’s O-centered, single-pangram configuration illustrates how dramatically the game’s texture can shift from one day to the next.
Where to Play the NYT Spelling Bee
The spelling bee free version is accessible through The New York Times Games platform. A limited version of the puzzle is available without a subscription, though full access to the daily puzzle and score tracking requires a New York Times Games subscription. The game is playable on desktop and through the NYT Games mobile app on both iOS and Android.
The May 26 CLICKABLE puzzle covered here previously illustrated how an L-centered hive creates a different solving experience from O-centered grids. Comparing the two boards side by side is one of the more instructive exercises for solvers who want to understand how center letter selection shapes the entire architecture of a given day’s puzzle.
For the official game, players can visit The New York Times Spelling Bee on the NYT Games platform, where all daily puzzles, scoring logic, and rank progression are managed directly by the Times editorial team.
