I Built a Free Spelling Bee Solver and Analysis Tool — Here's What It Does
So I've been playing the NYT Spelling Bee for a while now, and like probably a lot of you, I got tired of staring at those seven letters feeling like I'm missing obvious words. I'd sit there for 20 minutes, convince myself I'd found everything, check the answers, and realize I missed like 15 words including a pangram. Every single time.
So I decided to just build something myself. Not another janky tool that barely works — a proper site that actually helps you understand the puzzle, not just cheat your way through it. Something that gives you the answers when you want them but also shows you the interesting patterns and stats behind each puzzle.
It's called SpellingBee Solver and it's live at spellingbeesolver.dev. Completely free, no sign-up, no ads, no nonsense.
What Made Me Build This
Honestly, I tried a bunch of the existing solver sites out there. Some were okay, but most of them either had terrible UI, were super slow, or just showed you the word list and called it a day. I wanted something more — something that doesn't just give answers but actually helps you see the puzzle differently.
Like, have you ever wondered which center letter shows up most often? Or how today's puzzle compares to past puzzles in terms of difficulty? Or whether the same set of letters has ever been used before? That kind of stuff is genuinely interesting to me, and I couldn't find a single site that showed all of it in one place.
So I built it myself. Took a while, lots of late nights, lots of "why is this API returning 500 errors" moments, but it's finally at a point where I'm actually proud of it.
What the Site Actually Does
Let me walk you through the main features because there's quite a bit packed in here.
🐝 Today's Puzzle — Full Breakdown
The Today's Puzzle page is where most people will land. It shows the current day's puzzle with all the answers, but here's what makes it different from just looking at a list:
- Official answers clearly labeled — You know exactly which words are the NYT official answers
- Pangrams highlighted — Both regular pangrams and perfect pangrams (using all 7 letters) are called out because let's be real, those are the ones that matter most
- Points breakdown — You can see exactly how many points each word is worth and what the total possible score is
- Genius threshold — It shows you what score you need to hit Genius level, which is honestly kind of motivating when you're playing
- Words by first letter — A nice visual breakdown showing how many words start with each letter
- Points by word length — Because 4-letter words are worth 1 point but longer words can rack up serious points
- Spoiler reveal button — If you just want hints without seeing all answers immediately, you can reveal them on your own terms
I personally use this page after I've finished playing for the day, just to see what I missed and how close I was to Genius.
🔍 The Solver — Your Personal Word Finder
The Solver page is the tool I probably use the most. You can:
- Enter your 7 letters using an interactive honeycomb layout (same visual style as the actual Spelling Bee game)
- Or just type them in if you prefer a text input
- Hit solve and it finds every valid word from a dictionary of over 200,000 words
- One-click autofill — There's an "Autofill Today's Puzzle" button that pulls today's letters straight from the API so you don't even have to type them
The solver uses the TWL06 tournament Scrabble dictionary, so it's finding words that are actually valid in competitive word games. It's fast too — results come back in under a second usually.
I built the honeycomb input because honestly, typing letters into a plain text box felt wrong for a game that's so visual. The hexagonal layout just feels right.
📊 Stats That Are Actually Interesting
The stats page is probably my favorite part of the whole site. It's not just "here are some numbers" — it's the kind of stuff that makes you go "huh, I never thought about that."
- Hardest and easiest puzzles — Which dates had the most and fewest answers
- Most common center letters — Spoiler: some letters show up way more than others as the required center letter
- Letter frequency analysis — How often each letter from A to Z appears in puzzles, both as center letters and as valid letters
- How long are words in the Bee — Distribution charts showing word lengths across all puzzles ever
- Average word length trends — Because some puzzles just seem to have longer words
- Pangram statistics — How often do puzzles have 1 pangram vs 2 vs 3
There's something oddly satisfying about seeing the patterns emerge when you look at hundreds of puzzles worth of data. Like, did you know that some center letters have only appeared a handful of times? The bar charts make that really obvious.
📅 Archive — Browse Any Past Puzzle
The archive page lets you look up any puzzle by date. You can browse through and see answers, stats, and analysis for any day going back months. It's great for:
- Checking what you missed on a puzzle you played days ago
- Comparing different puzzles to see how they stack up
- Just browsing through and geeking out on the stats
There's a date picker that makes navigation super easy, and each puzzle in the archive has the same full breakdown as the today page.
Some Cool Things I Discovered While Building This
Building this taught me a lot about the Spelling Bee that I never noticed as a player:
Some letter combinations repeat — You'd think with 7 letters the combinations would be endless, but the same letters (or very similar sets) do come back. The site actually shows you "Haven't I seen these letters before?" with the history of when each letter combination appeared.
The difficulty varies wildly — Some puzzles have 20-odd answers and some have 60+. That's a 3x difference in how many words you need to find. The percentile rankings on each puzzle show you exactly where it falls compared to all others.
Genius is not always equally hard — Depending on the puzzle, hitting Genius might require finding 70% of available points, which could mean finding 15 words in an easy puzzle or 45 words in a hard one. The site shows you the exact threshold for each day.
4-letter words dominate — The word length distribution is heavily skewed toward 4-letter words. But those are only worth 1 point each. The real points come from the longer words, especially pangrams (which are worth 7+ points each).
There are tons of valid dictionary words that aren't official answers — The NYT doesn't include every valid word in their official answer list. My site shows you which valid dictionary words were excluded and why — sometimes it's obscure words, sometimes it's just editorial choice.
The Tech Behind It
For anyone curious about how it's built:
- Frontend — Astro with Svelte components and Tailwind CSS. Static site generated and deployed on Cloudflare Pages. Super fast load times because everything is pre-rendered.
- Backend — Cloudflare Workers with a D1 database (SQLite at the edge). The API handles puzzle data, word lookups, and all the statistical analysis.
- Dictionary — TWL06 tournament Scrabble dictionary for the solver, cross-referenced with the official NYT answers
- Data pipeline — Automated daily updates so the puzzle data is always current
I chose Cloudflare's stack specifically because I wanted the site to be fast everywhere. D1 at the edge means the database queries happen close to the user, and static generation means most pages load instantly without any server round-trips.
The whole thing costs basically nothing to run, which is why I can keep it free. Cloudflare's free tier is genuinely incredible for projects like this.
What's Next
I'm still working on improving things. Some stuff on my roadmap:
- More detailed historical analysis and trend charts over time
- A "two-letter list" showing how many words start with each two-letter combination (super useful for finding words you're missing)
- Better mobile experience (the site works on mobile but I want to make it really smooth)
- Maybe a browser extension that adds hints directly on the NYT Spelling Bee page
If you have feature ideas or find bugs, I'd genuinely love to hear about them. Building something for a community means listening to what the community actually wants.
Try It Out
If you're a Spelling Bee fan, give it a shot:
- Today's puzzle with full analysis: spellingbeesolver.dev/today
- Interactive solver: spellingbeesolver.dev/solver
- Homepage with all features: spellingbeesolver.dev
No sign-up needed. No paywall. No tracking. Just a tool I built because I wanted it to exist.
Happy spelling, folks! 🐝