Monday’s New York Times Spelling Bee arrives, as it often does, with a deceptively clean surface and a harder interior. The June 1, 2026 hive is built around seven letters – A, C, E, I, N, T, and X – with I locked in as the mandatory center. Every accepted answer must contain it. That single rule, applied across 44 valid words and one perfect pangram, defines the entire texture of today’s solve.
The puzzle was constructed by Sam Ezersky, who has edited the NYT Spelling Bee since its standalone digital launch in 2018. A fresh hive drops each day at 3 a.m. Eastern Time on the official NYT Games platform. Full access requires an active subscription, though the puzzle is among the most discussed in the broader daily word-game ecosystem.
The maximum score today is 223 points, placing this puzzle in the 72nd percentile of all hives ever published. Genius rank requires 156 points – and notably, it takes at least a six-letter word to get there. Players who find the pangram first will collapse the remaining solution space much faster, needing only 68 percent of remaining points rather than 75 percent without it.
Today’s Letter Set and Center Letter
Letters: A, C, E, I, N, T, X
Center Letter (Required): I
Total Valid Words: 44
Maximum Score: 223 points
Genius Threshold: 156 points
Pangrams: 1
The vowel structure here – A, E and I – creates a rich foundation for suffix-driven constructions. The consonants C, N, T and X do most of the mechanical work, with X being the most selective letter in the grid. Almost every X-bearing word in the solution set either opens or closes with it, and solvers who ignore X entirely are almost certain to miss the pangram and several high-value entries.
Today’s Pangram: INEXACT
The pangram for June 1, 2026 is INEXACT – a seven-letter adjective meaning not precise or accurate. It uses each of the seven hive letters exactly once: I, N, E, X, A, C and T. At seven letters, INEXACT earns 14 points (seven for length, seven bonus for using all letters), making it the single highest-scoring word in today’s puzzle.
INEXACT is one of those pangrams that sits quietly in plain view. The word is common enough that most solvers have used it in speech or writing, yet the X makes it easy to overlook on the board. Once found, it immediately signals the full range of what the grid can produce. This pangram has appeared in the Spelling Bee twice before – on December 8, 2024 (with C as center) and October 16, 2023 (with E as center). Today it returns with I at the center, generating a different but equally dense solution space.
Spelling Bee Hints for June 1, 2026
Before the full list, here are directional hints organized to reveal as little as possible for players who want to keep working independently.
The puzzle contains two words of nine letters, one of eight letters, two of seven letters, and several each at six, five, and four letters. The letter C starts more answers than any other letter in today’s grid. The letter X appears in only a small cluster of valid words; each one is worth finding specifically. The most commonly missed answer today is NIACIN – a B-vitamin that is perfectly valid and perfectly easy to forget when the grid is loaded with more dramatic constructions. TACTICIAN is the other standout: a nine-letter word that most solvers who reach Genius will have found, and one that tends to arrive late in the session when the brain finally starts assembling compound roots rather than single-pass suffixes.
Players working through the NYT Spelling Bee answers archive will recognize the structural logic at play today. The I-centered grid rewards solvers who work outward from the center letter through familiar English word families: ANTI-, INCI-, INTI- and the long TACTI- cluster that terminates in TACTIC, TACTICAL and TACTICIAN.
All 44 Spelling Bee Answers for June 1, 2026
The complete verified word list, organized by length from longest to shortest. Letters may be reused; every word must contain I.
9 Letters
TACTICIAN, NINETEEN
8 Letters
INITIATE
7 Letters
EXTINCT, TITANIC
6 Letters
ACETIC, ANCIENT, ENTICE, EXCITE, INCANT, INCITE, INTACT, INNATE, INTENT, TANNIC, TACTIC
5 Letters
ACACIA, ANTIC, ATTIC, CACTI, CANINE, CANTINA, INANE, NIACIN, NIECE, TACIT, TAINT, TANNIN, TITAN
4 Letters
ACAI, ANTI, ATAXIA, ATTAIN, CITE, EXIT, NINE, NICE, NITE, TAXI, TINE, TINT, TINCT
Word Spotlight: The Ones Most Solvers Miss
NIACIN is the answer that trips up the most players today. It is a nutrient – specifically a form of vitamin B3 found in meat, fish and legumes – and its double-N structure makes it feel too obscure for a puzzle that otherwise leans on classical English morphology. It is not obscure. It is simply easy to overlook when your brain is busy chasing the longer constructions.
ATAXIA deserves a mention as well. A medical term for the loss of full control of bodily movements, it uses four of the grid’s seven letters in a compact, vowel-heavy package that solvers often miss entirely on first pass.
TINCT is another quiet outlier. Meaning tinged or colored, it is a five-letter word that most players who find INTACT and EXTINCT never think to abbreviate into its root form. The Bee accepts it. It is worth remembering.
Players who enjoy tracking word origins will find CANTINA satisfying: the Spanish-rooted noun for a bar or small restaurant, now fully embedded in English-language dictionaries and a reliable NYT Spelling Bee answer whenever C, A, N, T and I share a grid.
Path to Genius: Scoring Strategy for June 1
To reach Genius on today’s puzzle, you need 156 of the 223 available points. The fastest route runs through the pangram and the two nine-letter words. INEXACT (14 points) plus TACTICIAN (9 points) plus NINETEEN (8 points) accounts for 31 points before you have found a single short word. From there, the six-letter tier – ACETIC, ANCIENT, ENTICE, EXCITE, INCANT, INCITE, INTACT, INNATE, INTENT, TANNIC and TACTIC – adds 66 more points if you clear it completely. That brings the running total to 97, leaving you 59 points short of Genius with the four- and five-letter pools still untapped.
The strategic priority today is to not fixate on the X words at the expense of the deeper C and T clusters. ENTICE, INCITE and EXCITE all rhyme and share a suffix, which means finding one makes the others almost automatic. Similarly, TACIT, TACTIC and TACTICIAN form a root chain that collapses with a single insight: the word TACIT is the seed from which both longer answers grow.
For context on how today’s difficulty compares to recent hives, the May 23 CYANIDE puzzle featured 61 words and a deceptively friendly surface that hardened quickly. Today’s 44-word grid sits in a more moderate register but compensates with a narrower phonetic corridor that punishes passive scanning more severely.
How the NYT Spelling Bee Works
For newer players: the New York Times Spelling Bee presents a honeycomb of seven letters, one of which is designated as the center letter and appears highlighted in yellow. Every valid answer must include that center letter, be at least four letters long, contain only the seven available letters (which may be reused freely), and appear in the NYT’s accepted word list: no proper nouns, no hyphenated words, no obscure or offensive terms.
Scoring is straightforward. Four-letter words earn one point each. Words of five letters or more earn one point per letter. A pangram any word that uses all seven letters at least once earns a seven-point bonus on top of its standard length score. Daily ranks progress through Beginner, Good Start, Moving Up, Good, Solid, Nice, Great, Amazing and finally Genius, with Queen Bee reserved for those who find every accepted word in a given puzzle.
The game resets each day at 3 a.m. Eastern Time, and streaks are tracked across devices for subscribers using the NYT Games app. The mobile version remains the most reliable way to monitor Queen Bee history and long-term solving statistics.
Completing today’s hive is a strong segue into the rest of the NYT puzzle lineup. Monday’s NYT Connections grid is also live, along with the daily Wordle, both of which share the same daily audience and the same appetite for methodical, pattern-based word thinking that makes the Spelling Bee one of the most durable puzzles in the NYT Games portfolio.
The NYT Games suite, which includes the Spelling Bee, Wordle, Connections, Strands and the Mini Crossword, has grown into one of the most visited daily destinations in digital journalism, drawing tens of millions of players each month across web and mobile platforms.
Come back tomorrow at 3 a.m. Eastern Time for the full June 2, 2026 Spelling Bee answer set, pangram breakdown and Genius strategy guide.
