Letter Hive

How to play

Type on a keyboard or tap the letters. Enter takes the word, Backspace removes a letter and Escape clears what you have typed. Every tile is a real button, so a keyboard works throughout.

Reorder moves the outer letters around. It changes nothing about the puzzle and is surprisingly good at shaking loose words you had stopped seeing.

Rules and controls — Zerdly's preset

• Seven letters, and the one in the middle is the core.
• Every word must contain the core letter. It is the only compulsory one.
• Letters may be used as often as you like. A hive with one T can still spell LETTER — except in Single Use, where that rule is turned off.
• No letter from outside the seven.
• Words are 4 letters or longer, and each one counts once.
• A word using all seven letters earns 28 points on top of its length. Every hive has at least one.

The scoring was counted, not chosen

Each length is worth roughly what its rarity says it should be. We counted every word that every candidate hive in the dictionary can produce — 384,545 of them — and worked the values out from how often each length actually turns up.

Four, five and six letter words are near-equally common, at about 41%, 25% and 18% of everything findable, so they step gently: 2, 3, 4. Then it steepens sharply, because the words really do run out — a nine-letter find is twenty-three times rarer than a four, and a ten is sixty-seven times rarer. Hence 10 and 16.

That is why the table has gaps in it. A tidier one would mean somebody had tidied it.

Presets

• Daily Hive — One hive a day, the same for everybody, built from the date. No clock, letters may repeat, and there is always at least one word using all seven.
• Open Hive — A fresh hive whenever you want one, on the same terms as the Daily. The way in, and the one to play when you have finished today's.
• Timed Sprint — The same hive rules with five minutes on the clock, which turns the game from digging into skimming. Take the words you can see rather than the ones you can find.
• Single Use — The rule changes: no letter may be used twice in the same word. That removes two words in three, so the hive is smaller and every find is harder — and there is still always one word using all seven exactly once.
• Deep Hive — A deliberately rich hive, no clock, and a running count of how many words are left at each length. The question stops being what you scored and becomes what is still in there.

Tips

• Find the all-letter word early. It is worth 28 on top of its length, there is always at least one, and hunting for it teaches you the hive.
• Work the endings. Once a word lands, try it again with an S, an ED or an ING — the letters are often right there.
• Remember that letters repeat. Doubled letters are where most missed words hide, because people quietly assume they are not allowed.
• Chase length rather than count. Four nine-letter words beat twenty four-letter ones, and it is not close.
• Use Reorder when you dry up. The same seven letters in a different arrangement genuinely does read differently.
• In Single Use, start from the seven-letter word. It always exists in that preset, and once you have it the shorter words follow.

Leaving in the middle of a round

A timed round remembers how much time was left, not when it was due to end. Close the tab and the clock stops with it; come back and you have the time you had. Untimed presets simply wait.

That is a deliberate choice. Scores are kept on this device and there is no leaderboard, so the stricter behaviour would achieve nothing except punishing a phone call or a flat battery.

Privacy and local play

Everything runs in your browser. Your current hive, your settings, your best scores and the hives you have seen recently are kept on this device only, and the button under the game clears them without touching any other Zerdly tool. No account, no sign-in, and nothing about your play leaves the machine you are on.

Questions

Can I use a letter more than once in the same word?

Yes, as often as you like. A hive with one T can still spell LETTER. That is the rule people most often get wrong, and getting it wrong the cautious way costs real words. The one exception is the Single Use preset, where the rule is deliberately turned off.

Does every word really have to use the middle letter?

Every single one. It is the only letter that is compulsory, and it is drawn larger and in the centre so it is hard to forget. A word made entirely of the outer six is refused however good it is.

Is there always a word that uses all seven letters?

Always, in every preset. Hives are not drawn at random and then checked — they are mined backwards out of the dictionary, starting from words that already use exactly seven distinct letters. The all-letter word is what suggested the hive, so it cannot be missing.

How is scoring worked out?

Longer words are worth more: 2 for four letters, 3 for five, 4 for six, 5 for seven, 6 for eight, then 10 for nine and 16 for ten. A word using all seven letters earns 28 on top.

Why does the scoring table jump around like that?

Because it was counted rather than chosen. Each value comes from how rare that length actually is among the words a hive can produce — measured across every candidate hive in the dictionary, which is 384,545 word slots. Four, five and six letter words are near-equally common, so they step gently; nine and ten letter words are twenty and sixty-seven times rarer than a four, so they pay a lot. The gaps in the table are what a measured table looks like.

Are there ranks or levels to climb?

No. There is your score while you play, and afterwards the share of the hive you actually took, which is a measured number rather than a title. Every word that was in there is shown at the end.

What makes Single Use different from just being harder?

It changes what is legal rather than how much there is. A letter may be used once per word, which removes about two words in three. It also needed its own hives: a word using all seven letters with none repeated is exactly seven letters long, and most hives have no such word — so Single Use draws only from the ones that do, and the all-letter prize stays reachable in every round.

What is the shortest word I can find?

4 letters. Anything shorter is noise rather than a find — a hive is thick with accidental three-letter strings, and a game where they counted would be about noticing rather than about words.

What happens if I close the tab in the middle of a Sprint?

The clock stops with it. A timed round remembers how much time was LEFT rather than when it was due to end, so you come back to the time you had. That is deliberate: your scores are kept on this device and there is no leaderboard, so there is nothing to protect by punishing a phone call.

Where does the word list come from?

It is the same 28,000-word common English list Zerdly's Word Scramble uses, built from a public-domain word list and ranked against a freely licensed frequency list. The same list picks the hives, checks your words and finds the ones you missed — so the game can never accept a word it would not have found itself.

Is anything sent to a server?

No. The word list, the hive and your progress all run in your browser. There is no account, and clearing this game's data leaves every other Zerdly tool untouched.

Related interactives

• Letter Grid Hunt — the same word list, traced through a grid of letters.
• Word Scramble — the letters loose in front of you.
• Cryptogram — decode a substitution cipher, one letter at a time.
• Word Ladder — turn one word into another, one letter at a time.