Word Hive

Word Hive gives you seven letters in a honeycomb and one simple job: build as many words as you can. Every word must be at least four letters long and must use the letter in the middle. Letters may be reused as often as you like, so ELDER works even though there is only one E in the hive.

The rules in ten seconds

• Words are four letters or longer.
• Every word must contain the centre letter.
• You may reuse any letter as many times as you want.
• Only the six outer letters and the centre are allowed — nothing else.

How scoring works

A four-letter word is worth 1 point. Anything longer scores one point per letter, so a seven-letter find is worth 7. The prize is the pangram: a word that uses all seven letters at least once. Every puzzle has at least one, and finding it adds a 7-point bonus on top of the word's normal score. Pangrams are highlighted in your found list so you can see at a glance whether you have caught one.

Your running total drives a rank that climbs from Beginner through Nice and Great all the way to Genius. The bar is a percentage of the puzzle's maximum, so you never need to find every single word to reach the top rank — but you will need the pangram.

Tips for finding more words

• Hit Shuffle often. Rearranging the outer letters genuinely helps — your eye stops seeing the same combinations and starts spotting new ones.
• Work the endings. Run through -ING, -ED, -ER, -LY and -ION against the letters you have; plurals in -S are an easy sweep if S is in the hive.
• Hunt the pangram early. Start from the rarest letter in the set — pangrams almost always hang off it, and landing one lifts your rank immediately.
• Try the centre letter in every position. It is easy to keep placing it in the middle of a word when it actually belongs at the start or the end.
• Say the letters aloud. Hearing the combinations surfaces words that reading them silently does not.

A new hive every day, plus endless practice

Everyone gets the same puzzle each day, so you can compare how far you got. When you want more, New puzzle serves a fresh hive straight away — there is no daily limit and no waiting. Your found words and rank are saved in your browser for each puzzle, so you can close the tab and pick the same hive back up later.

In the mood for something else? Play the daily Wordle, decode nonsense in Guess the Gibberish, or browse all our games.