The New York Times Spelling Bee for Thursday, July 2, 2026, opens with a honeycomb that is dense, M-heavy, and unusually rewarding for solvers who think in word families. With 53 accepted answers, a total point ceiling of 258, and a single pangram that also qualifies as a perfect pangram, today’s puzzle is one of the more structurally elegant hives of the summer. If you came here for the full answer list, it is below. Spoilers begin immediately.
Today’s Hive at a Glance
The seven letters in today’s grid are M, E, G, I, L, N, and T, with M locked in the yellow center position. Every valid word must contain M. The puzzle produces 53 accepted words worth a combined maximum of 258 points. Genius rank requires 181 points, which represents the standard 70 percent threshold. Queen Bee status demands all 53 words.
Today’s puzzle is harder than it initially appears. The center letter M restricts the viable word set considerably, and a large portion of the answer list relies on repeated letters, particularly doubled M and doubled L. Players who struggle past the 30-word mark typically find the logjam broken by committing to longer constructions and working through every available suffix.
Today’s Pangram: MELTING
The sole pangram for July 2 is MELTING, a seven-letter word that uses every letter in the alphabet exactly once. That makes it a perfect pangram, a designation given when no letter appears more than once in the word itself. Perfect pangrams are rarer than standard pangrams and are generally considered harder to spot because the word cannot be padded with repeated letters. MELTING earns 14 points: seven for its letter count and seven for the pangram bonus. For players running a Genius-pace strategy on The New York Times Games platform, locating MELTING early is the single most efficient opening move in today’s puzzle. It immediately contributes more than seven percent of the Genius threshold in one word and reveals the full letter inventory available for every remaining answer.
MELTING is not a difficult word to recognize once the M-centered constraint is acknowledged, but it can sit stubbornly out of view when solvers are scanning for shorter entries first. If you have been in the hive for more than fifteen minutes without finding the pangram, try building outward from MELT before testing any other base root.
Score and Rank Thresholds
- Total words: 53
- Maximum score: 258 points
- Genius threshold: 181 points
- Queen Bee: All 53 words
- Pangrams: 1 (MELTING, perfect)
Hints Before the Full List
The puzzle distributes its 53 words across word lengths from four letters to eleven letters. There are 19 four-letter answers, 4 five-letter answers, 11 six-letter answers, 10 seven-letter answers, 7 eight-letter answers, 1 nine-letter answer, and 1 eleven-letter answer. The longest word in today’s hive runs to eleven letters and is one of the more satisfying Queen Bee discoveries of 2026 so far.
Players who want directional clues rather than the full solution should focus on: words built on the MELT root and its derivatives; words using the -ING suffix attached to M-rooted stems; words involving doubled L or doubled M; and words that use the GI- or GL- opening consonant cluster. The eleven-letter answer rewards solvers who think about formal or legal registers of English vocabulary.
For context on how today’s puzzle compares to recent hives, yesterday’s two-pangram puzzle featured HICCUPED and HICCUPPED with a 224-point ceiling, making today’s grid both higher-scoring and structurally tighter. The shift from two pangrams down to one, combined with the jump to 258 maximum points, reflects a deliberate increase in answer density across longer word lengths.
Full Answer List for July 2, 2026
The complete verified answer list for today’s NYT Spelling Bee, organized by word length, is below.
4-Letter Words (19)
EMIT, ITEM, LIME, LIMN, MEET, MELT, MEME, METE, MIEN, MILE, MILL, MIME, MINE, MINI, MINT, MITE, MITT, TEEM, TIME
5-Letter Words (4)
GIMME, LIMIT, MELEE, MINIM
6-Letter Words (11)
GIMLET, MEMING, MENTEE, METING, METTLE, MILLET, MIMING, MINGLE, MINING, MITTEN, TIMING
7-Letter Words (10)
ELEMENT, EMINENT, LEMMING, LIMNING, LINEMEN, MEETING, MELTING, MILLING, MINTING, TEEMING
8-Letter Words (7)
EMITTING, IMMINENT, LIMITING, LINIMENT, MINGLING, TENEMENT, TIMELINE
9-Letter Words (1)
GENTLEMEN
11-Letter Words (1)
ENTITLEMENT
Notable Words and Definitions
Several answers in today’s list are worth pausing on, either because they are easy to miss or because they carry interesting lexical weight.
LIMN is one of the four-letter answers most frequently skipped in today’s hive. It means to draw or paint a portrait, a usage familiar from art criticism and literary description but absent from everyday conversation. Its presence in the NYT Spelling Bee word list is consistent with editor Sam Ezersky’s preference for words that sit at the edge of common vocabulary.
MIEN, another four-letter answer, refers to a person’s air or bearing, the outward expression of character. It appears regularly in the Spelling Bee across years and is worth memorizing as a reliable short-word contributor in any M-centered puzzle.
LEMMING is the seven-letter answer that tends to arrive late for most solvers. The doubling of the M in the middle can feel counterintuitive when the grid is already so M-saturated, but it follows directly from the base word and is fully accepted.
ENTITLEMENT, at eleven letters, is the longest word in the puzzle and one of the longer accepted answers in any 2026 Spelling Bee. It draws on four of the seven available letters in close repetition and rewards solvers willing to work through multi-syllable constructions systematically. According to Wikipedia’s history of the game, the Spelling Bee has increasingly featured compound and derived forms of common legal and institutional vocabulary, a trend that ENTITLEMENT fits squarely.
LINIMENT, the eight-letter answer, is another word that catches players off guard. It refers to a liquid or lotion rubbed onto the skin for pain relief, a word well established in medical and athletic contexts but infrequently seen in word puzzles. Its structure, drawing on L, I, N, I, M, E, N, T, makes efficient use of the repeated letters available in today’s hive.
Strategy Notes for Today’s Puzzle
The dominant structural pattern in today’s Spelling Bee is the layering of a small set of root words through suffix expansion. MELT generates MELTING and METING. MILL generates MILLING. MINE generates MINING and MINGLING. Working through each short word and asking whether it extends into a valid six-, seven-, or eight-letter form is the fastest route to the Genius threshold.
The doubled-letter trap is real in today’s puzzle. GIMME, LEMMING, MIMING, MEMING, MINIM, and IMMINENT all require either doubled M or a structure that makes the repeated letter feel wrong at first glance. Solvers who hesitate on doubled consonants will leave points on the board. When in doubt, submit the word. The game does not penalize incorrect guesses.
For broader context on why today’s puzzle skews toward suffix-heavy constructions, the complete guide to the game explains how modern Spelling Bee design increasingly rewards pattern recognition over isolated vocabulary recall.
The June 25 puzzle centered on FIXATED demonstrated a similar design logic, where a single clean pangram unlocked a structured cluster of related answers. Today’s MELTING plays the same role but in a denser grid. And the June 24 puzzle built around ENCAMPMENT showed how suffix-chaining across a T-centered hive can produce an unusually high word count, a parallel worth drawing when looking at today’s eleven-letter ceiling entry.
Today’s NYT Spelling Bee drops its next puzzle at midnight Pacific Time, 3 a.m. Eastern, as it does every day. A fresh hive and a new center letter arrive for Friday, July 3.
