Friday’s New York Times Spelling Bee is live, and it arrives with the kind of hive that looks welcoming at a glance and quietly grows more demanding the moment common vocabulary runs dry. The puzzle is built on seven letters – N, A, C, I, L, P, and T – with P locked in at the center of the honeycomb. Every valid word must contain P, reach a minimum length of four letters, and draw only from the letters on the board. Today’s grid holds 60 accepted words, one pangram, and a maximum Queen Bee score of 306 points. It is a Bingo puzzle, meaning at least one word begins with every letter available on the board.
The pangram is APPLICANT – nine letters, worth 16 points, and the structural key to the entire grid. It uses all seven letters, leans on Latin roots that passed through Old French before entering English legal and administrative vocabulary, and contains within it several shorter answers that solvers hunting for the four-letter floor will likely land on before they see the full word. Finding APPLICANT early does not simply boost the score; it confirms the letter inventory and opens the densest scoring corridors on the board.
Spelling Bee Hints for June 12, 2026
Today’s hive has 60 words distributed across seven starting letters. P leads the board with 17 entries – more than a quarter of the total solution set – followed by C at 13 and T and A each contributing 8. N accounts for 6, L for 4, and I for 4. The word-length distribution runs from 14 four-letter entries at the base through 15 five-letter words, 18 six-letter words, 7 seven-letter words, 2 eight-letter words, and 3 nine-letter words, capped by one ten-letter entry worth 10 points.
For players who want directional clues before the full spoiler, here are structural pointers grouped by letter. P words include a sandwich bread variation, a pasta name associated with Italian street food, an outdoor decoration hung at celebrations, a small seed found in apples, a young bird not yet fully feathered, a thin pipe or tube, and the cognate of the pangram itself. C words include a waterway cut by engineering rather than erosion, a popular children’s social event, a traditional Cuban dance that repeats its own name, a nutrient found in red meat and dairy, a dental term, a clinical professional designation, and a word meaning untouched or pristine. T words include a military rank, a flavor profile associated with sharp cheese, a drum used in South Asian music, a pattern of mixed colors, and a word meaning to cover unevenly with spots.
Spelling Bee Answers Today, June 12, 2026 (Full List)
The complete verified answer set for today’s NYT Spelling Bee, in alphabetical order by first letter, is below. Spoilers begin immediately.
A words (7): ANAL, ANNAL, ANTI, ANTIC, ANTICIPANT, ATTAIN, APIAN
C words (13): CANAL, CANNA, CANCAN, CANT, CANTATA, CANTINA, CAPTAIN, CATNAP, CATNIP, CLAN, CLINIC, CLINICAL, CLINICIAN
I words (4): INAPT, INCANT, INITIAL, INTACT
L words (4): LAIN, LANAI, LANTANA, LINT
N words (6): NAAN, NAIL, NANA, NATAL, NIACIN, NATANT
P words (17): PAIN, PAINT, PANINI, PANIC, PANT, PATINA, PINTAIL, PINT, PINATA, PIPPIN, PLAIN, PLAN, PLANT, PLANTAIN, PLAINT, PLIANT, APPLICANT (pangram)
T words (8): TAINT, TANNIC, TANNIN, TACTICIAN, TITAN, TITANIC, TINCT, TINT
Today’s Pangram: APPLICANT
APPLICANT is defined as a person who formally requests something – a position, an award, a permit – and submits the required documentation to be considered. The word derives from the Medieval Latin applicantem, the present participle of applicare, meaning to attach or apply. It entered English in the mid-sixteenth century through administrative and ecclesiastical usage, where it described someone petitioning an institution for a benefit or office. The word sat at the center of legal correspondence for centuries before modern usage extended it to job markets and academic admissions. Its nine-letter span and clean phonetic structure – the doubled P is audible, not hidden – make it one of the more satisfying pangrams the Spelling Bee has produced in recent weeks. Once solvers locate it, the grid reorganizes around a legible system of shorter derivatives.
Notable and Tricky Words
ANTICIPANT is the ten-letter entry and the longest word in today’s puzzle, worth 10 points and rarely encountered in everyday speech. It means one who anticipates or expects something in advance – its Latin root, anticipare, shares ancestry with the more familiar ANTICIPATE. Many solvers will find the nine-letter APPLICANT without ever noticing that a ten-letter word is also hiding in the same letter set.
TACTICIAN is a nine-letter word worth 9 points and one of the puzzle’s highest-value entries outside the pangram. It describes someone skilled in devising plans or maneuvers, particularly in military or competitive contexts. The doubled C in the middle is the structural trap – solvers who do not hear both hard C sounds risk misspelling it.
CLINICIAN, also nine letters and worth 9 points, refers to a medical professional who works directly with patients rather than in research or administration. Like TACTICIAN, it ends in -CIAN and requires both the hard C and the N to close. These two words together represent the most efficient path toward Genius rank for players who solve them early.
NATANT is a six-letter adjective meaning floating or swimming, drawn from the Latin natare. It survives primarily in heraldry, where it describes a fish depicted in a horizontal swimming position on a coat of arms. The word is accepted by the Spelling Bee’s editorial team, though it will strike most solvers as genuinely obscure.
NIACIN is a B vitamin – vitamin B3 – essential for metabolic function and found in meat, fish, and fortified foods. Its place in the puzzle is a reliable pattern: the Spelling Bee frequently includes scientific and nutritional vocabulary that solvers with a background in biology or medicine will locate quickly while others miss it entirely.
CANTINA is a six-letter word for a small bar or canteen, particularly associated with Spanish-speaking cultures and made broadly familiar through popular film and media. It sits comfortably within the grid’s larger cluster of C words that begin with CANT.
PINTAIL is a seven-letter word referring to a species of dabbling duck recognized by the elongated central tail feathers of the male. It is a standard ornithological term and one of the more quietly satisfying finds in a puzzle that rewards solvers who range across multiple vocabulary domains.
PIPPIN is a six-letter word for a variety of eating apple, originating in Old French pepin, meaning a seed or pip. It is the kind of word the Spelling Bee reliably includes – not obscure, but not the first thing a solver reaches for under pressure.
LANAI is a five-letter word for a roofed porch or veranda, used primarily in Hawaiian architectural vocabulary. Its vowel-heavy construction makes it easy to miss on a board that otherwise skews toward consonant-heavy combinations.
Players who have been following this week’s daily coverage may notice that Friday’s puzzle rewards a different strategic approach than earlier in the week. This hive is phonetically dense rather than morphologically layered, which means the premium is on rapid consonant pairing – recognizing how P anchors four-letter entries, how the doubled N generates a cluster of TANN- words, and how the -ANT suffix runs through a sequence of five- and six-letter solutions before culminating in the pangram itself. Solvers who understand that structural logic will reach Genius considerably faster than those who hunt word by word. For comparison, Monday’s OBJECTED puzzle rewarded verb-stem recognition above all else – a fundamentally different skill set from what today’s board demands.
For the full NYT Games lineup today, yesterday’s Connections answers are archived and available for comparison, and today’s Wordle and Strands solutions are covered separately in the daily puzzle rotation. The Friday Spelling Bee typically draws heavier search traffic than any other day of the week – a reflection of solvers who have accumulated the week’s frustrations and are hunting for a clean sweep before the weekend reset.
The New York Times releases a fresh Spelling Bee puzzle every day at midnight Eastern Time, with the same grid available to all players simultaneously regardless of location. The game was developed under the editorial oversight of puzzle editor Sam Ezersky, whose design philosophy consistently favors structural elegance over vocabulary difficulty – a distinction that explains why the hardest days are not always the ones with the most obscure words, but the ones where the phonetic pattern is most counterintuitive. Merriam-Webster serves as the lexical authority the puzzle team consults when adjudicating contested entries, and solvers who disagree with a rejection would do well to check there first.
For a full explanation of how the game works, scoring tiers, and strategies for reaching Queen Bee status, the complete Spelling Bee guide covers the mechanics in detail.
