Spelling Bee Puzzle

Your words

Rules

• Words are four letters or longer and must use the middle letter.
• Letters can be reused as often as you like — PEELED is fine with one E.
• A word using all seven letters is a pangram and scores seven bonus points. Every puzzle has at least one.
• Four letters score 1 point. Longer words score one point per letter.
• There is never an S in the letters. With one, every plural is free, which triples the word count without adding a single interesting find.

Ranks

Beginner 0% · Good start 2% · Moving up 5% · Good 8% · Solid 15% · Nice 25% · Great 40% · Amazing 50% · Genius 70%

Ranks are a share of that puzzle's own maximum, so a thin board and a rich one both take real work to finish.

S is banned, and it is the commonest letter in the dictionary

Letters are reusable here, so a set containing S would make every plural free: find "cabin" and you have found "cabins" for no extra thought. Measured against this page's dictionary, 6,944 of 11,077 words contain an S — 62.7%, and more than any other letter. It beats even E, by 825 words.

That ordering is a plural effect rather than a fact about English spelling: 4,718 of the S-words — 68% of them — are simply another word in the same dictionary with an S on the end. Those are answers you already had. So the generator refuses every candidate set containing one, and it is a real refusal rather than an intention: of the 46 sets that survive its tests, not one has an S in it.

And only 46 letter sets are playable at all

There are 657,800 ways to choose 7 distinct letters from 26, and 7 choices of centre for each — millions of puzzles in principle. Almost none is worth playing. A set has to hold enough words to make a game and at least one pangram, a word using all 7 letters. Searching leaves 46 candidates standing — roughly one set in 14,300. Which is why this page searches rather than shuffles. Handing out a random seven letters would give a puzzle with three answers in it most of the time, and no pangram at all nearly always.

A worked example: the set abcehmr with a at the centre yields 39 words of 4 letters or more, every one drawn from those seven letters and every one containing the centre, including 1 pangram. The pangram requirement is the part doing the real work. It guarantees at least one word uses everything, so no letter in the honeycomb is decoration — a set without one leaves a letter you never need, and players notice within a minute.