About The Word Bee

An independent word-puzzle publisher. Eight daily games, hand-validated word lists, free forever, no signup required.

Who builds this

Shyam Valsan — Founder & Editor Engineer, founder at Netdata (open-source observability platform). Started The Word Bee in February 2025 to build word games I'd actually want to play on my morning commute. GitHub · shyam@thewordbee.com

The Word Bee is a one-person shop. I write the code, curate the word lists, review the puzzles, and read every piece of reader feedback. When something feels off — a pangram that's too obscure, a connections group that's ambiguous, a word that shouldn't be in the dictionary — I'm the person who fixes it.

I'm not a linguist. I'm an engineer who loves word games and got frustrated with the state of free alternatives. Most "free" word-game sites are ad-choked, require signups, or gate yesterday's puzzle behind a paywall. I wanted something different: the whole experience, free, forever, with the craft of the puzzles taking priority over the monetization.

How we build puzzles

Spelling Bee

Each daily Spelling Bee puzzle is generated from a pool of 7-letter base words (stored in utils/words.txt) and validated against the Enable dictionary — the same dictionary used by most competitive word games. Every puzzle is programmatically filtered to ensure:

Total points between 150 and 300 (so puzzles are neither trivially easy nor impossibly hard)
At least one pangram per puzzle (67.5% have exactly one, 32.5% have two or more)
No puzzle includes the letter S (to match the NYT convention and avoid plural-word inflation)
Minimum 25 valid words per puzzle (median: 52)

As of April 2026, we have 2,578 pre-generated puzzles covering every day from February 2025 through February 2032. That's seven years of daily content, all validated before launch. Full methodology and statistics: The State of Daily Word Games 2026.

Wordle, Scramble, Connections, Word Search, Crossword, Wordfall

Each game uses a dedicated puzzle generator script (all in utils/) that applies the same quality gates: every puzzle is validated against a dictionary, checked for solvability, and pre-generated in bulk. No puzzle ships without passing automated tests.

Anagram Solver

The Anagram Solver runs entirely in your browser — no server round-trip, no logging of your queries. It searches the same ~170,000-word Enable dictionary used by the games.

Editorial standards

Dictionary transparency Every game tells you exactly which dictionary it uses. Disputes over valid words can always be cross-checked against the source.

No dark patterns No fake urgency. No engagement-manipulation. No forced signups. The site is designed to be good, not to be sticky.

Freshness over SEO-bait Blog posts get a visible "last updated" date. If a guide is two years old, you'll see it. We update, we don't re-publish.

Corrections policy Spot an error in a puzzle or article? Email shyam@thewordbee.com. I respond personally. Corrections get a dated note at the bottom of the affected page.

Privacy We use Google Analytics and Google AdSense. We don't ask for your email unless you want newsletters. We don't use behavioral profiling beyond standard ad personalization (which you can disable via Google's ad settings).

What makes us different from the NYT and competitors

Eight games, one site. Spelling Bee, Wordle, Connections, Crossword, Word Search, Scramble, Wordfall, and Anagram Solver — all playable without juggling subscriptions.
Full archive, free. Go back to any day in the past and play that puzzle. No subscription wall on yesterday's game.
No account required. Your streaks and stats live in your browser's local storage. No login, no password, no data harvest.
Open about the craft. The puzzle generators are documented. The dictionary is named. The process is legible.

Who this site is for

The Word Bee is built for adults who love word games and don't want to pay $7/month per game to play them. It works on any device, in any browser. The typography is readable. The touch targets are big. No animations that make you nauseous.

The business model

We run display ads (Google AdSense). We recently added an optional Premium tier ($3.99/mo or $35.99/yr) that removes ads and adds a personal stats dashboard, cross-device sync, and streak protection. Premium is strictly additive — nothing that works today stops working if you don't pay. If ads ever start getting in the way of the games, that's a bug. Email me.

Press & inquiries

If you're a journalist, blogger, or teacher looking for a quote, data, or a sample puzzle, email shyam@thewordbee.com. I respond within 48 hours.

For data about our 2,578-puzzle corpus (most-used pangrams, rarest center letters, difficulty distribution), see our State of Daily Word Games 2026 report.

Found a bug? Have a puzzle suggestion? Want to partner?
Write to shyam@thewordbee.com. I read every email.