Good morning, solvers. Thursday’s New York Times Spelling Bee has landed, and it is built around a letter set that looks unassuming until you start filling in the hive. There are two pangrams hiding in plain sight today: a respectable 40 words on the board, and a center letter that turns up in almost everything you write down. If you came here for the spelling bee answers without the wait, the full list is below the hints.
Today’s puzzle, June 18, 2026, uses the letters D, E, F, I, O, T, and X, with T sitting in the center. That means every valid word has to contain a T, which sounds restrictive until you notice how many common verb endings and past-tense forms naturally supply one. The puzzle tops out at a respectable point total, and the path to Genius runs almost entirely through -ED endings once you spot the pattern.
Today’s NYT Spelling Bee Hints
If you would rather work through the hive yourself before checking the full solution, here are a few nudges to get you moving.
- There are two pangrams today, and one is simply the other with a prefix attached.
- Past-tense verbs dominate this grid. If a four-letter word works, try adding -ED.
- The longer pangram shares its first four letters with the shortest word in the five-letter column.
- Double letters show up more than once today, so do not rule out words like FOOTIE or TOFFEE just because they look unusual.
- No word in today’s puzzle uses the letter X more than once, but it appears in two separate word families.
Today’s Pangrams
Thursday’s hive contains a primary pangram and a slightly shorter secondary pangram built from the same root. The main pangram is DETOXIFIED, the past tense of detoxify, meaning to remove poison or harmful substances from something, whether that is a body, a system, or a piece of language stripped of jargon. The secondary pangram is TOXIFIED, the past tense of toxify, to make something poisonous. Both words use all seven letters in the hive, and finding either one early effectively unlocks the rest of the board, since most remaining answers are shorter relatives drawn from the same DETOX and FEET-FOOT-FETE word families.
NYT Spelling Bee Answers Today, June 18, 2026
Here is the complete verified word list for today’s puzzle, organized by length so you can check your progress against the board rather than scroll through an unsorted dump.
10 Letters
DETOXIFIED
8 Letters
TOXIFIED
7 Letters
DETOXED
6 Letters
DIETED, DOTTED, EDITED, EFFETE, EXITED, FITTED, FOOTED, FOOTIE, TEXTED, TIDIED, TOFFEE, TOOTED
5 Letters
DETOX, DITTO, DOTED, FETED, FETID, IDIOT, TIDED, TOTED
4 Letters
DEFT, DIET, DOTE, EDIT, EXIT, FEET, FETE, FOOT, TEED, TEFF, TEXT, TIDE, TIED, TIFF, TOED, TOOT, TOTE
That is 40 confirmed words across six length tiers, with DETOXIFIED standing alone as the only ten-letter entry. Players chasing Genius rank should lean on the -ED past-tense pattern early. Once DETOXED, DIETED, DOTTED, EDITED, EXITED, FITTED, FOOTED, TEXTED, and TOOTED are locked in, the remaining four and five-letter words tend to fall quickly because they share the same root letters in a shorter form.
How Today’s Puzzle Plays Out
What makes Thursday’s hive interesting is how tightly it clusters around two unrelated word families. One branch runs through DETOX and its derivatives: DETOX, DETOXED, DETOXIFIED, TOXIFIED. The other runs through FOOT, FEET, FETE, and FETID, a looser cluster connected mostly by shared letters rather than shared meaning. Solvers who recognize this split early tend to move through the board faster, since spotting one word in a family often suggests its neighbors. FOOTIE, the informal British term for a casual game of soccer, and TEFF, a cereal grain native to Ethiopia and the base ingredient in injera bread, are the two words most likely to stump even experienced players today.
The puzzle was built, as always, by longtime Spelling Bee editor Sam Ezersky, whose grids have become known for rewarding pattern recognition over raw vocabulary size. Thursday’s puzzle fits that house style. Nothing on the list is especially obscure, but the overlap between the DETOX and FOOT families means a player who works methodically through suffixes will outperform someone who is simply trying to recall rare words from memory.
NYT Spelling Bee Scoring and Rank Guide
Four-letter words earn one point each, while every word five letters or longer earns one point per letter. Pangrams receive a seven-point bonus on top of their letter count, which is why DETOXIFIED is worth disproportionately more than its length alone would suggest. As points accumulate, players move through a series of named ranks, from Beginner and Good Start near the bottom, through Good, Solid, and Nice in the middle tiers, up to Great, Amazing, and finally Genius, which typically requires around 70 percent of the maximum score. Finding every single word in the hive earns the unofficial Queen Bee title, a feat that roughly a quarter of regular players manage on any given day.
Today’s letter distribution leans heavily on T, E, and D, which is typical for puzzles built around past-tense verb forms. If you are stuck on a specific word, it is worth running through every -ED ending you can attach to a known four-letter root before assuming the word does not exist in the hive.
What Is the NYT Spelling Bee?
The Spelling Bee is the New York Times’ daily vocabulary puzzle, presenting players with seven letters arranged in a honeycomb grid. One letter sits in the yellow center hexagon and must appear in every word submitted. Words need a minimum of four letters; letters can be reused as often as needed, and proper nouns, hyphenated terms, and obscure abbreviations are excluded from the accepted list. Every puzzle guarantees at least one pangram, a word that uses all seven letters at least once, and pangrams always carry the heaviest point value on the board.
The game published a fresh puzzle at 3 a.m. Eastern Time, as it does every day, and remains playable through the NYT Games platform on desktop and mobile. A limited free version is available to all players, while full archive access and the Spelling Bee Buddy hint tool require an active NYT Games subscription.
Players working through the wider Times puzzle slate today can also check this morning’s Connections groupings, which split into a workout-class category and a tricky wordplay trap in purple, or revisit yesterday’s Strands solution, themed around barnyard tools with WHEELBARROW as the standout long answer. For Thursday’s five-letter challenge, the confirmed Wordle answer is also live now.
Spelling Bee history shows real day-to-day variation in difficulty. Earlier this month, the June 8 puzzle built around OBJECTED produced 47 words and a noticeably higher ceiling than today’s hive, a reminder that letter selection rather than letter count usually decides how brutal a given day feels. Bookmark this page and check back tomorrow morning for the next set of verified answers, hints, and the day’s pangram breakdown.
