The NYT Spelling Bee answers today, for Tuesday, August 25, 2026, run to 40 words and 218 points. The centre letter is B and the outer six are G, I, N, O, T and U.
Today’s two pangrams are the same word twice. BUTTONING is the first. UNBUTTONING is the second, and it contains the first one whole.
Centre letter in gold. Every valid word must contain it.
Spelling Bee Hints Today, August 25, 2026
- Centre letter B. Every word carries one, and several carry three.
- There is no A and no E on the board. The only vowels are I, O and U, which is why today’s list is so much shorter than yesterday’s.
- Two pangrams, and one of them sits inside the other.
- Fifteen of the 40 words end in -ING. If you are stuck, conjugate.
- Ten of the 40 are only four letters long and worth a point each. That is where a stalled solver should look first.
Spelling Bee Pangrams Today: BUTTONING and UNBUTTONING
Neither one is perfect. A perfect pangram uses all seven letters exactly once and runs to seven letters; BUTTONING is nine and UNBUTTONING is eleven, so both repeat.
They are worth 16 and 18 points respectively, seven of that being the pangram bonus in each case. Between them they carry 34 of the day’s 218, which is more than a seventh of the board from two words.
Yesterday’s pair was the opposite arrangement. DORMANT and MORDANT were both perfect pangrams and anagrams of each other, built from exactly the same seven letters in a different order. Today’s pair is nested rather than shuffled, which is rarer and, for a solver, considerably kinder. Find one and you have most of the other.
Spelling Bee Answers Today: Full Word List
Eleven letters: UNBUTTONING
Nine letters: BUTTONING
Eight letters: UNBUTTON
Seven letters: BINGING, BINNING, BOBBING, BOGGING, BOOTING, BUGGING, BUNTING, BUTTING
Six letters: BIOTIN, BITING, BOBBIN, BONBON, BONING, BONITO, BONOBO, BOOBOO, BOOING, BUNION, BUTTON, GIBBON, GIBING, NUBBIN, TUBING
Five letters: BIGOT, BINGO, BOING, BONGO
Four letters: BONG, BOOB, BOON, BOOT, BOUT, BUNG, BUNT, BUTT, NOOB, OBIT
That is ten fours, four fives, fifteen sixes, eight sevens, one eight, one nine and one eleven. Score them and the length values come to 204, plus 14 for the two pangram bonuses, which is the 218 above.
The Centre Letter Is B, Whatever Else You Have Read
At least one site publishing today’s puzzle gives the centre letter as U. It cannot be. BOOB, OBIT, BIGOT, BINGO and GIBBON are all valid answers today and not one of them contains a U, which is impossible if U is the letter every word must use. Every single one of the 40 words contains a B.
This is the second day running the same error has gone out, and it is worth knowing why it matters. If you filter your guessing on the wrong centre letter you do not just lose a few words, you lose the ability to find any of them, because the constraint is the only thing narrowing a seven-letter alphabet down to something searchable.
Why Today’s List Is So Short
Forty words against yesterday’s 57, and the reason is the vowels. A and E are the two letters English leans on hardest and neither is on the board. What is left is I, O and U carrying four consonants, and B is compulsory.
That forces the list into a narrow shape. Fifteen words end in -ING, six of them doubling a consonant on the way. Doubled letters are everywhere else too: BOOB, BOOBOO, BOBBIN, BOBBING, NUBBIN, BUTT, BONBON. A board with no A and no E does not produce elegant words. It produces this.
The Words Most Solvers Will Not Have
NUBBIN is the one that stops people. It is a small lump or a stunted, undeveloped piece of fruit, and it is not a word that comes to mind unaided.
BIOTIN is next, and it is more useful outside the game than in it. It is vitamin B7, the one sold for hair and nails. BONITO is a fish in the tuna family. BOING is accepted, which surprises people, and so is NOOB.
GIBING is the sly one. To gibe is to jeer or taunt, it takes a single B, and it is sitting in a word list that also contains GIBBON with two. A solver who has found the ape will not necessarily think to drop a letter.
What We Can and Cannot Confirm
The word list above appears identically on two independent trackers, letter for letter. The centre letter is confirmed by three. The two pangram values of 16 and 18 points match the arithmetic exactly, and that is the check worth caring about: if the pangram scores are right, the scoring model behind every other word on the list is right too.
The count is the soft part, and it is soft everywhere. The New York Times does not publish its word total or its Queen Bee score anywhere a reader can check before solving, so every figure in circulation this morning is a reconstruction, and the reconstructions disagree.
Two are worth naming, because the way they fail is instructive. One tracker heads its page with 59 words and 328 points and then prints these same 40; the same site undercounted yesterday’s puzzle by three, so its totals are not load-bearing. Another heads its page with 23 words and then prints 33, and the seven it leaves out are BOOB, BOOBOO, BUTT, BUTTING, BUTTON, UNBUTTON and BIGOT. Every one of those contains BUTT or BOOB apart from the last. That is a profanity filter running over a word list, not a puzzle, and it is why that page is missing an eight-letter answer worth eight points.
So: 40 words and 218 points, counted by hand from a list two sources agree on. If the Times’ own figure differs it will differ at the margin of what its dictionary accepts, and every word above will still be valid.
Yesterday’s Spelling Bee answers ran to 57 words and 274 points on two perfect pangrams.
Today’s other puzzles: Wordle #1893, Connections #1171, Strands #905 and the Mini Crossword.
