Saturday’s New York Times Spelling Bee arrives with the kind of hive that looks manageable at first light and then quietly tightens into one of the week’s more disciplined vocabulary challenges. Today’s puzzle is built on seven letters – A, E, I, K, L, T, and V – with I locked in as the mandatory center letter. Every word on the board must contain it, and that single constraint is doing the majority of the structural work.
The puzzle yields 39 valid answers worth a maximum of 156 points, with one pangram anchoring the entire solution space. Genius threshold sits at 110 points, which means solvers need to clear the middle tiers cleanly before the high-value long words start pulling the score upward. If you landed here searching for the spelling bee answers or want a complete breakdown of every accepted word, you are in the right place. Spoilers follow immediately.
Today’s Pangram: TALKATIVE
The sole pangram for Saturday’s puzzle is TALKATIVE. The nine-letter adjective meaning freely or excessively communicative uses all seven letters of the hive – A, E, I, K, L, T, and V – and earns the standard pangram bonus of seven additional points on top of its base nine-letter score. It is one of the more recognizable pangrams the Spelling Bee has offered this month, which makes it simultaneously the most satisfying find and the one most likely to arrive early in a session for experienced solvers.
Finding TALKATIVE early unlocks the architecture of the board. Once you see it, the hive stops feeling like a random letter cluster and starts behaving like a deliberate vocabulary filter built around the -IVE suffix, the -ATE suffix family, and the LT- and TL- consonant pairings that give today’s grid its particular texture.
NYT Spelling Bee Hints for June 13, 2026
Before the complete answer list, here is the structural breakdown of today’s hive for players who want nudges without a full reveal.
Today’s puzzle contains 18 four-letter words, 9 five-letter words, 6 six-letter words, 1 seven-letter word, 2 eight-letter words, and 3 nine-letter words. The letter T starts the most answers of any letter in the grid, with 14 words beginning there. A starts 8 words, V starts 6, L starts 6, K starts 3, and E starts 2. Every word contains the center letter I.
The four-letter tier is generous but has traps. Players who rush through it often miss TALI, the plural of talus, the ankle bone, and TIKI, the carved Polynesian figure that doubles as one of the more culturally familiar short answers in this hive. Both are accepted by the Bee and worth recovering if they escaped your first pass.
At the five-letter tier, ATILT and AVAIL are the two entries most likely to separate players stuck in the Amazing range from those pushing toward Genius. TIKKA, as in the Indian spice preparation, is the other five-letter answer that tends to arrive late in sessions.
The six-letter tier is where Saturday’s puzzle does its gatekeeping. ALKALI, the chemical base compound, and TALLIT, the Jewish prayer shawl, are both accepted, and both have sent solvers to their dictionaries. TALLIT in particular reflects the Spelling Bee’s long-standing practice of including religiously and culturally specific vocabulary that sits in the active lexicon of some communities and the passive lexicon of others.
TITTLE, the small dot placed over the letters i and j in standard orthography, is the six-letter answer that historically trips up players who know the word intellectually but have never tried to spell it under pressure. It contains a double T at the start and a double T in the middle, which makes it one of the more orthographically surprising entries in today’s set.
Complete NYT Spelling Bee Answers for June 13, 2026
Below is the full verified solution list for today’s New York Times Spelling Bee, organized from shortest to longest. Every word uses the required center letter I, and letters may be repeated freely within any answer.
4-letter words (18): ALIT, EVIL, KILL, KILT, KITE, LIKE, LILT, LITE, LIVE, TAIL, TALI, TIKI, TILE, TILL, TILT, VEIL, VIAL, VILE
5-letter words (9): ALIKE, ALIVE, ATILT, AVAIL, ELITE, TIKKA, TITLE, VILLA, VITAL
6-letter words (6): ALKALI, AVIATE, LITTLE, TALKIE, TALLIT, TITTLE
7-letter word (1): VITIATE
8-letter words (2): LEVITATE, TITIVATE
9-letter words (3): ALLEVIATE, TALKATIVE, TITILLATE
Notable Words and Definitions
VITIATE: To impair or make legally invalid. The word comes from the Latin vitiare, meaning to corrupt or spoil, and appears regularly in legal and philosophical writing. It is the seven-letter entry that most players overlook entirely on their first pass through the grid.
TITIVATE: To make small improvements to one’s appearance; to smarten oneself up. The eight-letter answer is built on the same root family as TITIVATION and tends to arrive for solvers who work through TIT- openings systematically rather than waiting for recognition to strike.
ALLEVIATE: To make suffering, deficiency, or a problem less severe. The nine-letter answer sits in the same tier as TALKATIVE and TITILLATE, giving Saturday’s puzzle an unusually rich long-word layer for a 39-answer grid.
TITILLATE: To stimulate or excite in a mild way, often with a connotation of arousing curiosity or light excitement. The nine-letter answer shares its TIT- opening with TITTLE and TITIVATE, which makes the consonant cluster one of the most generative starting points in today’s hive.
TALKIE: A motion picture with a synchronized soundtrack, as opposed to a silent film. The word entered common usage in the late 1920s during the transition from silent cinema to sound, and its inclusion here reflects the Bee’s habit of threading culturally anchored vocabulary into grids that could otherwise feel purely clinical.
Path to Queen Bee
Reaching Queen Bee on Saturday requires all 39 words and the full 156 points. The path runs through systematic coverage of the four core letter families: TI-, AL-, VI-, and KI-. Solvers who clear those four clusters first and then return to the AV- and EL- openings for secondary sweeps will find the board drains more efficiently than it does under a random-scan approach.
The two eight-letter answers, LEVITATE and TITIVATE, are the words most statistically likely to separate Amazing from Queen Bee on this particular grid. LEVITATE is findable through association once ELITE and VITAL are in place. TITIVATE requires either lexical familiarity or the willingness to test every combination of the TI- opening across the longer word lengths.
For context on how Saturday’s letter distribution compares to recent puzzles, the May 25 VARMINT hive, which also centered on a single consonant, produced 43 answers against a T-centered grid that rewarded the same kind of systematic first-letter sweeping that works here today.
How the NYT Spelling Bee Works
The New York Times Spelling Bee presents players with seven letters arranged in a honeycomb pattern, with one letter marked as the required center. Every accepted word must include the center letter, contain at least four letters, and appear in the game’s internal dictionary. Proper nouns, hyphenated words, and obscure terms the editors consider too specialized are excluded. Letters may be reused within a single word as many times as needed, which is what produces entries like TITILLATE, TITTLE, and TITIVATE from a single compact letter set.
The game was created by Frank Longo and has been edited daily by Sam Ezersky since 2018. It resets every morning at 3 a.m. Eastern Time as part of the New York Times Games subscription suite alongside Wordle, Connections, Strands, and the Mini Crossword. The official Spelling Bee is accessible through the NYT Games platform on web and mobile.
Scoring works on a per-letter basis for words of five letters or more, with a flat one point awarded for every four-letter word. Pangrams earn a seven-point bonus. The Genius threshold is set at approximately 70 percent of the maximum possible score. Queen Bee requires every accepted word in the grid.
Spelling Bee in the Broader NYT Games Context
Saturday’s Spelling Bee puzzle sits alongside the full weekend NYT Games lineup. Today’s Wordle answer for puzzle 1820 is QUELL, a five-letter verb meaning to put an end to rebellion or suppress a feeling, and it has been drawing attention for its double-L construction. The NYT Connections answers for Saturday are live as well, with all four category groupings available for players who want the full breakdown before the daily reset.
Among the word games in the Times’ daily suite, the Spelling Bee occupies a distinctive position. Unlike Wordle, which presents a single binary solve, the Bee rewards incremental discovery across an entire session and scales in difficulty depending on how far into the solution set a player chooses to push. That structure is a large part of what has made it one of the most sustained daily habits in the NYT Games catalog.
The CLICKABLE pangram from May 26 remains one of the more memorable hives of the spring for the way it rewarded solvers who recognized the -ABLE suffix chain. Saturday’s TALKATIVE grid operates on a different mechanism entirely, privileging the -IVE and -ATE families over suffix chains, but the underlying principle is the same: the pangram defines the architecture, and the architecture rewards those who find it first.
Players who prefer hints before answers can also consult the Merriam-Webster dictionary, which serves as the primary reference standard for word eligibility in the Spelling Bee and provides definitions for entries like TITIVATE and TALLIT that solvers encounter infrequently enough to want confirmation on.
