The New York Times Spelling Bee for Sunday, June 14, 2026, opens the weekend’s final morning with a hive that is compact in size and generous in structure. Seven letters – H, A, D, E, I, N, and P – are arranged in the familiar hexagonal honeycomb on the Times Games platform, with H locked in as the mandatory center. Every accepted word must carry it. That single constraint does more to shape Sunday’s puzzle than anything else on the board.
Twenty-six answers. Three pangrams. A Queen Bee ceiling of 158 points. A perfect pangram among the shortest, and a 10-letter crown word waiting at the top for anyone patient enough to find it.
This is not a sprawling puzzle. It is a precise one, and precision is its own kind of difficulty.
Today’s Letters and the Center Letter
Sunday’s seven letters are H (center), A, D, E, I, N, and P. The supporting cast is almost entirely consonant-friendly, with only two vowels – A and E – and a third, I – available for word construction. That vowel scarcity matters. It forces solvers away from long Latinate constructions and toward compound and derived forms built on common Anglo-Saxon roots. The word HAND, for instance, opens a chain that runs through HANDED, HEADPIN, and DEADHEADED. Once you see the chain, the hive becomes readable. Before you see it, the grid can feel strangely thin.
The center letter H is the gravitational anchor for the entire solution set. Every answer orbits it. No word can exist in this puzzle without it, which means that solvers who organize their mental search around H-initial words, medial H constructions, and H-terminal forms will move through the list faster than those who try to work purely by intuition.
The Pangrams: HEADPIN, PINHEAD, and PINHEADED
Today’s puzzle contains three pangrams, two of which are perfect pangrams – meaning they use each of the seven letters exactly once. Those two are HEADPIN and PINHEAD. The third, PINHEADED, earns its pangram bonus through extension rather than perfection, repeating the letters H and E in the process.
HEADPIN is the lead pin in a bowling lane – the foremost pin at the apex of the triangular formation that every bowler aims for. It is a compound of obvious components, but its bowling-specific register makes it the kind of word that escapes solvers who are not thinking in sports vocabulary.
PINHEAD is the small, rounded metal head at the blunt end of a sewing pin. Colloquially, it has served for generations as an informal term for a person considered foolish or empty-headed, a usage that carries a mildly archaic quality in contemporary speech but remains entirely current in the puzzle world. Both senses are defined by Merriam-Webster, which confirms the word’s standing in standard American English.
PINHEADED, the 10-letter crown of the puzzle, extends that colloquial sense into adjectival territory: displaying a notable absence of intelligence or good judgment. It is an uncommon enough construction to feel genuinely rewarding on discovery, rare enough that the New York Times has deployed it as a pangram only a handful of times in the Bee’s history. It is also the word that separates players who reach Amazing from those who climb to Queen Bee.
Hints by First Letter
For players still working through the puzzle, here is a directional framework organized by first letter. No full answers are given at this stage – only the count and general shape of what each letter produces.
H words (15 total): The H section is the largest by far, which makes sense given that H sits at the center and every four-letter answer beginning with the center letter tends to be short and familiar. Expect a mix of body-language words, physical descriptions, standard nouns, and one or two botanical terms. The six-letter and seven-letter entries in this column are where most players lose time.
A words (2 total): Both are five letters or longer. One is a directional adverb familiar to anyone who has read 19th-century prose. The other is a biological term in common usage.
D words (1 total): A single eight-letter entry. It involves a repeated root and a suffix, and is far easier to find once you have already discovered DEADHEAD.
P words (3 total): All three are pangrams or derived from the PINHEAD root. Finding one unlocks the others through basic suffixation logic.
The Full Answer List for June 14, 2026
The following is the complete verified answer list for today’s New York Times Spelling Bee, organized from shortest to longest. All 26 words are confirmed. Letters may be reused freely; each answer must contain the center letter H.
4 Letters (6 words): HAND, HEAD, HEAP, HEED, HIDE, HIND
5 Letters (3 words): AHEAD, APHID, HENNA
6 Letters (9 words): DAPHNE, HANDED, HAPPEN, HEADED, HEAPED, HEEDED, HEINIE, HIDDEN, PEASON – wait. Let us be precise: DAPHNE, HANDED, HAPPEN, HEADED, HEAPED, HEEDED, HEINIE, HIDDEN, PEAHEN
7 Letters (2 words): HEADPIN, HENNAED, PINHEAD
Note: HEADPIN and PINHEAD are both seven-letter perfect pangrams. HENNAED is a seven-letter non-pangram describing something treated or colored with henna.
8 Letters (2 words): DEADHEAD, HAPPENED
9 Letters (1 word): PINHEADED
10 Letters (1 word): DEADHEADED
Scoring Breakdown and Path to Genius
Sunday’s puzzle carries a maximum score of 158 points, achievable only by finding all 26 answers including all three pangrams. The Genius threshold, set at roughly 70 percent of the total point value, lands near 111 points for today’s grid.
Reaching Genius without the pangrams is difficult but possible. It requires sweeping the four-letter tier completely, collecting the majority of five- and six-letter entries, and landing HAPPENED and DEADHEAD in the eight-letter column. In practice, most players who reach Genius on a Sunday puzzle do so by finding at least one pangram, because the seven-point bonus attached to each pangram compresses the gap between Amazing and Genius faster than any comparable set of short-word discoveries.
The most efficient path to Genius on today’s grid: start with HAND, HEAD, HEAP, and HIDE to clear the four-letter floor. Then work through HANDED, HEADED, HEAPED, HIDDEN, and HAPPEN to build the six-letter mass. HAPPENED follows directly from HAPPEN. HEADPIN or PINHEAD, once found, adds the pangram bonus. At that point, Genius is almost certainly within reach.
Queen Bee requires PINHEADED and DEADHEADED, the two longest entries. DEADHEADED, meaning treated in the manner of a deadhead – either as a passenger traveling without a ticket or as a gardener removing spent blooms – is the kind of word the Spelling Bee saves for solvers who think in compound verb forms rather than simple nouns.
Words Worth Noting
DAPHNE is worth a moment’s pause. In Greek mythology, Daphne was a naiad nymph transformed into a laurel tree while fleeing the god Apollo. In contemporary usage, Daphne is primarily a given name, but the genus name Daphne also refers to a group of ornamental shrubs known for their fragrant flowers. The New York Times accepts it in its botanical sense, and it has appeared in the Bee several times in that capacity.
PEAHEN is the female of the peacock, and it is the kind of gender-specific animal term that players recall instantly once prompted and forget entirely when staring at a letter grid. If you are stuck in the six-letter tier, PEAHEN is almost certainly among the words you have not yet found.
HEINIE is accepted in today’s puzzle as an informal term, a colloquial noun in common American English usage. It sits in an interesting gray zone in terms of formality, but the Times has included it here without restriction.
APHID, the five-letter entry, refers to the small, soft-bodied insect that feeds on plant sap and is the bane of gardeners worldwide. It is among the less intuitive five-letter answers today because solvers often overlook medial-H placements when scanning, and APHID places the H in the third position rather than opening with it.
How Today’s Puzzle Fits the June 2026 Calendar
June 2026 has been a month of structural variety in the Spelling Bee from the New York Times. The month opened with a center-letter I grid on June 1, moved through a dense E-centered hive with the OBJECTED pangram – what was one of the more technically demanding puzzles of early June – and has since alternated between compact single-pangram grids and multi-pangram configurations that test vocabulary depth.
Sunday’s puzzle, with its three pangrams and 26-word list, sits in the middle of that range: not as dense as Monday’s OBJECTED puzzle, not as spare as last Tuesday’s five-letter-heavy configuration. It is a puzzle that rewards methodical searching over brute-force scanning, and it is the kind of grid that experienced Bee players tend to find genuinely satisfying rather than merely difficult.
The three-pangram structure is relatively rare on a Sunday. Most weekend editions of the Spelling Bee carry one or two pangrams. Three in a single Sunday hive signals that the puzzle editor, Sam Ezersky, has leaned into the compound-word register that the H-A-D-E-I-N-P letter set makes available – and that the payoff for finding all of them is correspondingly high.
A Note on the NYT Games Ecosystem
The Spelling Bee sits within a daily games suite that has grown substantially over the past several years. Wordle, which resets daily with a five-letter target word, and NYT Connections, which challenges players to group 16 words into four hidden categories, are the two closest siblings in terms of daily player volume. Together, the three games form the core of what has become one of the largest subscription-based word game platforms in the world.
The Spelling Bee first appeared in the Times in print form in 2015, created by puzzle constructor Frank Longo following a suggestion from crossword editor Will Shortz. The digital daily version launched in May 2018 and has been edited by Sam Ezersky ever since. Its word list – curated, debated, and occasionally controversial – remains one of the most discussed elements of the puzzle among its daily community of solvers.
For players who prefer to work through the puzzle independently before consulting answers, the recommended approach is always to exhaust the four-letter tier first, then move systematically through five- and six-letter constructions before attempting the longer entries. Today’s hive rewards that discipline. The pangrams, once found, make the remaining entries easier to see.
Come back tomorrow morning for the full June 15, 2026 NYT Spelling Bee answer set, as soon as the new hive drops.
