The New York Times Spelling Bee for Wednesday, June 10, 2026, arrives with a compact and precisely engineered hive that rewards players who think in consonant clusters rather than chasing vowel-heavy constructions. With the letter H locked at the center of today’s puzzle and six outer letters – C, G, I, M, N, and O – the grid produces exactly 25 valid words worth a maximum of 133 points. One pangram hides inside the hive, and reaching Queen Bee today demands the kind of phonetic patience that separates experienced solvers from the crowd. This is the complete, verified breakdown of every answer in today’s NYT Spelling Bee.
Today’s Spelling Bee Letter Configuration
The official letter set for the June 10, 2026, puzzle is: C, G, I, M, N, O with H as the required center letter. Every valid word must contain H. Words must be at least four letters long. Letters may be reused as many times as needed. Proper nouns, hyphenated words, and obscene terms are not accepted.
The puzzle was edited by Sam Ezersky, who has overseen the daily Spelling Bee for the New York Times Games since its standalone digital launch in 2018. A new puzzle goes live each day at 3 a.m. Eastern Time.
Today’s Pangram: MOOCHING
The single pangram for June 10 is MOOCHING, an eight-letter word that uses all seven letters in the hive at least once. In standard usage, mooching refers to the act of obtaining something by begging or cadging, typically without offering anything in return. The word carries a casually dismissive register – the sort of word used when someone has been surviving on borrowed coffee and borrowed goodwill for one week too many.
MOOCHING is worth 15 points: one point per letter plus the seven-point pangram bonus. It is the structural key to today’s puzzle, and finding it early often unlocks the morphological logic behind the rest of the word set.
Spelling Bee Hints for June 10, 2026
Before the full answer list appears below, here is a set of calibrated hints for players who want to push further before consulting the solution. Today’s puzzle has a notably high concentration of CH-initial words, a double-H construction tucked inside a six-letter entry, and one Italian-derived culinary term that trips up even strong solvers. The four-letter answers are almost entirely single-syllable, which makes them easy to overlook. The seven-letter cluster rewards players who work the -ING suffix systematically across multiple root words.
- There are 25 total words today.
- The maximum score is 133 points.
- There is one pangram.
- There are 6 four-letter words, 6 five-letter words, 4 six-letter words, 6 seven-letter words, and 3 eight-letter words.
- The letter C begins 11 of the 25 words.
- The letter H begins 7 of the 25 words.
Spelling Bee Scoring Breakdown
The NYT Spelling Bee uses a tiered scoring system that advances players from Beginner through Good Start, Moving Up, Good, Solid, Nice, Great, Amazing, and Genius, before the coveted Queen Bee status at the top. The Genius threshold is reached at 70 percent of the maximum possible score. For today’s puzzle, Genius requires approximately 93 points. Queen Bee demands all 133 points, which means finding all 25 words, including the pangram.
Four-letter words are worth 1 point each. Words of five letters or more earn one point per letter. Pangrams receive the standard per-letter score plus a seven-point bonus, making MOOCHING worth 15 points total: 8 for letter count plus 7 for the pangram.
Complete Answer List: NYT Spelling Bee June 10, 2026
All 25 verified answers are listed below, organized by word length. Words are confirmed against standard dictionary usage and cross-referenced with solver databases.
4-Letter Words (6 words)
- CHIC – Elegant and fashionable in dress or manner.
- CHIN – The lower part of the face below the mouth.
- COHO – A Pacific salmon species, also called the silver salmon.
- HIGH – At or to a great elevation or level.
- INCH – A unit of linear measurement equal to one-twelfth of a foot.
- NIGH – Near in place, time, or relationship; an archaic or literary term.
5-Letter Words (6 words)
- CHINO – A twilled cotton fabric, or trousers made from it.
- CINCH – Something that is easy to accomplish; also a tight grip or fastening.
- CONCH – A large spiral-shelled marine mollusk, or the shell itself.
- HOOCH – Informal term for alcoholic liquor, especially of inferior quality.
- MOCHI – A Japanese rice cake made from glutinous rice, pounded into a sticky, chewy confection.
- MOOCH – To obtain by begging or taking without permission; to cadge.
6-Letter Words (4 words)
- CHICHI – Affectedly trendy or elaborate; excessively stylish in a showy way.
- HOMING – Returning to or navigating toward a home or target point.
- HONCHO – An informal term for a person in charge; a leader or boss.
- HONING – Sharpening or refining, as a blade or a skill.
7-Letter Words (6 words)
- CHIGNON – A knot or coil of hair worn at the nape of the neck.
- CHIMING – Producing a melodious ringing sound; the present participle of chime.
- GNOCCHI – Small Italian dumplings made from potato, semolina, or flour, typically served with sauce.
- HINGING – Depending on or turning as if on a hinge; pivoting around a central point.
- HOGGING – Taking or using more than one’s fair share; also a structural stress term in shipbuilding.
- INCHING – Moving very slowly and gradually, typically in small increments.
8-Letter Words (3 words, including the pangram)
- CHINNING – Performing a chin-up exercise; pulling one’s chin up to bar level.
- CINCHING – Fastening or tightening securely, as a belt or a saddle girth.
- MOOCHING – Pangram. Begging or obtaining something through persistent cadging without reciprocation.
Words That Are Not in Today’s Puzzle
Several plausible-looking constructions do not appear in the accepted answer list. GONGING looks viable but is not accepted. NOCHING and MOCHING are not recognized words. The letter S is never used in the NYT Spelling Bee, which eliminates all plurals and third-person singular verb forms as solutions.
Tricky Words to Know
GNOCCHI is the entry most likely to stump players today. Its Italian origin gives it a spelling that defies English phonetic intuition: the G is silent, making the pronunciation roughly “nyoh-kee.” The entry for gnocchi in Merriam-Webster confirms this pronunciation and traces the word’s origin through Italian dialect, making it one of the more culturally specific entries the Spelling Bee has offered this month. CHIGNON is similarly counterintuitive, borrowed from French with a soft GN construction that sounds nothing like its letter sequence suggests. COHO is a compact four-letter entry that many players miss entirely, not recognizing it as an accepted common-noun species name rather than a proper noun. MOCHI has crossed into mainstream American vocabulary through the rapid expansion of Japanese food culture, and the NYT accepts it without hesitation.
How to Play the NYT Spelling Bee
The Spelling Bee is part of the official daily puzzle suite from The New York Times, accessible through an active NYT Games subscription or a standalone games subscription. The game presents seven letters in a hexagonal honeycomb pattern with one letter fixed at the yellow center. Players type or tap to build words, and the game validates submissions in real time. All valid words must contain the center letter, use only the seven available letters, be at least four characters long, and appear in the game’s curated dictionary. Letters can be reused any number of times within a single word. The puzzle resets daily, and there is no penalty for incorrect guesses.
Players aiming for Genius need to reach 70 percent of the day’s maximum point total. Reaching Queen Bee requires finding every accepted word in the puzzle, a feat that typically demands knowledge of some obscure or specialized vocabulary. Editor Sam Ezersky has confirmed in interviews that he intentionally excludes the letter S from the outer ring specifically to prevent the puzzle from becoming too easy through simple pluralization.
Spelling Bee Strategy: How to Find Every Word Today
The dominant pattern in today’s puzzle is the CH- onset. Eleven of the 25 words begin with C, and the majority of those use the CH- digraph. Any player who systematically builds CH + vowel combinations and then adds suffixes such as -IN, -ING, -IMNO, and -INON will unlock a significant portion of the answer list without needing to rely on obscure vocabulary. The second productive cluster is the H- onset: seven words begin with H, several of which extend through -OM, -ON, -IN, and -OG roots. Players who work these two families methodically should be able to reach Genius or beyond before confronting the harder entries. GNOCCHI remains the single most isolated answer in the grid, having no morphological relatives among today’s accepted words. Finding it requires stepping outside the dominant CH- and H- logic entirely.
For a broader archive of recent puzzles and long-form strategy analysis, the May 19, 2026 Spelling Bee offers a useful comparison point, featuring a significantly larger 62-word grid and dual pangrams that illustrate how the puzzle’s difficulty ceiling can shift dramatically from day to day.
Today’s NYT Games: Wordle, Connections, and Strands
The Spelling Bee sits alongside three other daily word puzzles in the NYT Games ecosystem. Players tracking multiple games today can find the latest Wordle answer and full hint breakdown, updated each morning with the verified solution, strategic hints, and a complete difficulty analysis. The Connections puzzle for June 10, 2026, is also live, requiring players to group 16 words into four hidden categories, each escalating in difficulty from yellow to purple. Strands presents a 6×8 letter grid built around a daily theme and a spanning word that crosses the entire board.
All four puzzles share the same reset window, going live at 3 a.m. Eastern and expiring at midnight. Players who complete the full set daily report that the Spelling Bee is consistently the most time-intensive of the four, primarily because it does not offer a fixed number of attempts or a structural limit that forces closure.
