Spelling Bee · the long end
Hard Spelling Bee Words
8,481words
8,481 words of 9 letters or more are eligible for a Spelling Bee puzzle in ENABLE, the public-domain word list Wordton searches, and the longest of them runs to 16 letters built from no more than seven different ones.
Written by Blake Boege Last checked
Long words that stay inside the puzzle's seven letters. They are hard to see for a specific reason, and it is a reason you can learn to spot.
Why these are worth knowing
A nine-letter word built from at most seven different letters has to reuse letters heavily, and that is exactly what makes it invisible on a board. Your eye looks for new letters and there are none: the word is the same handful rearranged and repeated. INTESTINE, TITILLATE and REITERATE are the shape, and once you have seen a few you start finding them.
They are also where the points are. Length is what scores in the Bee, and a single long word is worth a run of short ones. More usefully, they are the words that most often turn out to be the pangram, because reaching nine letters inside seven distinct ones usually means using all seven.
How this list was built: every word in our dictionary that is eligible for a Bee puzzle at all, filtered to 9 letters and longer. Nothing here is a judgement about how obscure a word is, which we have no defensible way to measure. Length is the claim, and length is what the list is sorted by.
Type letters you know or letters you have ruled out. The list updates as you type.
16-Letter Words (1)
15-Letter Words (9)
14-Letter Words (27)
13-Letter Words (92)
Showing the first 60 alphabetically of 92 at this length. The filters above can narrow the list.
12-Letter Words (310)
Showing the first 60 alphabetically of 310 at this length. The filters above can narrow the list.
11-Letter Words (869)
Showing the first 60 alphabetically of 869 at this length. The filters above can narrow the list.
10-Letter Words (2,268)
Showing the first 60 alphabetically of 2,268 at this length. The filters above can narrow the list.
9-Letter Words (4,905)
Showing the first 60 alphabetically of 4,905 at this length. The filters above can narrow the list.
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Wordton is not affiliated with The New York Times. These lists are drawn from ENABLE, a public-domain word list, not the puzzle's own dictionary.