The hive that never closes.

Of all the puzzles the New York Times has ever published, the Spelling Bee is the one I’d still recommend if I had to pick a single daily for someone who’d never solved a puzzle in their life. It’s also the one I rate above the Times’s crossword, which is going to get me letters. Bear with me.

The Bee is seven letters arranged in a honeycomb — one of them in the centre and required in every word, six on the outside. You make as many words as you can — minimum four letters, repetitions allowed, no proper nouns — until you hit a points threshold the puzzle calls Genius. There’s also a higher tier called Queen Bee, reserved for finding every word the editors decided was a word, which is roughly half lunacy and half occupational therapy.

i The pangram is the whole game

A pangram is a word that uses all seven letters at least once. Every Bee has at least one; some have two or three. Finding the pangram is worth seven bonus points and, more importantly, tells you what kind of day it is. If the pangram is something common like FLOATING, the puzzle is approachable and Genius is half an hour away. If it’s JUVENILE or OXIDIZING, the day will be harder, but you also now have a confirmed seven-letter scaffold to build the rest of your word list from.

The trick to spotting pangrams is to look at the awkward letter first. The Bee’s puzzles are generated to be solvable; if there’s a J or a V or a Z in the outer ring, the pangram is almost certainly built around it. Then you ask: what common suffix attaches to that letter? J takes -ING (judging, juicing). V takes -OUS (envious) or -ING (deriving). K takes -ING or -ED. Find the awkward letter, find the suffix, the pangram is somewhere between them.

ii The two-pass method

I have used this method daily for four years. It produces Genius in 15–25 minutes on an average day. Here it is.

First pass. Type words as fast as they come to you, four and five letters only. Don’t try to be clever; the Bee gives you points for volume on this pass. Aim for fifty short words before you slow down. The point of the first pass is psychological as much as mechanical — you want to bank enough points that the harder pangram hunt feels like a victory lap rather than a slog.

Second pass. Pangram hunt. Identify the awkward letter, attach a common suffix, brute-force the middle. Once you have the pangram, the seven-letter word usually has six-letter substrings that are also valid, and you can pick those off in three or four minutes.

Optional third pass. Queen Bee. This is where you go if you have an hour and a grievance. Don’t.

Genius is a reasonable daily goal. Queen Bee is a personality disorder.

iii The editor’s blind spots

The Bee’s word list is curated by humans, which means it has consistent prejudices. It hates: most British spellings, almost all dialect, words it considers offensive (a much wider category than the dictionary’s), and any word it thinks is “obscure” even if it’s in a standard dictionary. It loves: gerunds, agentive nouns ending in -ER, and surprisingly specific cooking terminology.

Learning the editor’s taste matters more than vocabulary. If you spend three minutes trying variations of GUNNY and the Bee won’t take any of them, the issue is editorial, not lexical. Move on. Try the variant where the same root takes a different suffix. The puzzle is much more forgiving of unusual word forms than it is of unusual roots.

iv When to use a companion site

I publish the Spelling Bee Answers companion page daily, which lists the pangram and the full word list. I’ll be honest about how I use it: I solve the Bee unaided, then check it at the end to see which two words I missed, and grumble at the editor for the rejected ones. That’s the use I’d recommend. If you check it before you solve, you’re not playing the Bee — you’re reading a word list, which is the sort of thing one does on a flight, not at breakfast.

v Common mistakes

• Hunting the pangram first. On most days, you’ll find more points faster with the four-letter pass than with a pangram hunt. Pangram comes second.
• Ignoring the centre letter. Every word must use the centre letter. If you’ve been staring at the puzzle for ten minutes and you’re short on words, check whether your shortlist is using the centre. It’s easy to forget.
• Going for Queen Bee on a workday. Queen Bee can eat ninety minutes. It rarely teaches you anything you didn’t already know at Genius. Stop at Genius.
• Refusing NANA. The Bee allows surprising amounts of doubled-letter informal vocabulary. Try the obvious thing twice.