Letter Hive

• Every word must contain the centre letter. A word made only from the outer six is not a word here, however good it is.
• Every word must be four letters or longer. Three-letter words do not score.
• Only the seven letters on the board may be used — no others, at all.
• Letters may repeat as often as you like. The seven letters are a palette, not seven tiles. On a hive holding L and U, LULL is perfectly legal.
• A word that uses all seven letters scores its length plus a seven-point bonus.
• Proper nouns, hyphens and apostrophes are out, because they are not in the dictionary this game judges against.

The repeating-letters rule is the one most people get wrong on their first hive, and it is the rule that makes the puzzle work. Without it a hive of seven distinct letters could only ever make words of seven letters or fewer with no letter twice, which rules out most of English — every word with a double letter in it, and every word longer than seven.

Two different lists do two different jobs, and confusing them is how a word game loses players. Your entries are judged against the full 172,823-word validation list, so an obscure word you happen to know still scores. The 25,322-word familiar list is what the hive is built from and what the ranks are measured against — it decides how many points are on the table, not what is allowed.

The practical effect is that there is always more to find than the total admits to. On a standard hive the validation list accepts about 3.2 times as many words as the familiar pool the ranks count, so a run of unusual finds pushes your score up without moving the target at all.

Both lists come from ENABLE, which is public domain, and nothing here is drawn from any copyrighted or licensed tournament list. Word Hunt judges what you type against that same validation list, so a word accepted in one is accepted in the other. Word Scramble draws its answers from the same familiar list, though it asks for one particular word rather than everything you can find.

The flat one point for a four-letter word is the rule that stops a hive turning into a typing exercise. Four-letter words are 34% of everything a standard hive holds but only 7% of what it is worth: they are worth having and not worth chasing. A seven-letter word using all seven letters pays 14 — as much as fourteen fours — which is exactly the search that makes the puzzle interesting.

A hint costs 3 points. It names the first letter and the length of one word you have missed, and how many words share that shape — never the word itself.

Reaching Swarm is what counts as a win in the statistics panel. The ladder is measured by score and not by word count on purpose: a hive's long words are worth many times its short ones, so a player who has found eight sevens is far further in than one who has found eighteen fours, and a count would tell them the opposite. The bottom of the ladder is crowded — three ranks inside the first tenth — because the first ten minutes are when somebody decides whether this is a game they play.

Not from a random draw. Seven letters pulled out of a bag are usually a dead hive — the draws that work are the ones that happen to spell something. So each hive is read off a real word: the generator picks a familiar word of seven to nine letters that has exactly seven distinct letters, and those are the seven. There are 4,102 such words in the shipped list, between them making 3,242 distinct letter sets, and 1,389 of them are exactly seven letters long.

That choice buys a guarantee no random draw can give: the source word is spellable from its own letters, is at least seven letters long and contains whatever letter is chosen as the centre, so every hive dealt holds at least one word using all seven letters. It is never a hive with no big word in it.

The hive is then measured before it is dealt. If the pool of familiar words falls outside the size chosen for that board, the whole thing is thrown away and read off a different word, up to forty times — and if all forty miss, a sweep of the source list finishes the job rather than settling for the nearest near miss. That is what makes the size on the label a guarantee and not a likelihood: one deep hive in about six thousand used to come out a word short of its own floor. Across the first 600 puzzle numbers of each size every hive lands inside its window, and 580 of the first 600 standard hives were a different set of seven letters from each other.

Yes, and it is not close. The centre is a filter applied to every single answer, so the same seven letters make a completely different puzzle depending on which one sits in the middle. Take the set A, C, E, L, P, R, S — the same seven letters every time, with only the centre changed:

Centring on E gives more than twice the puzzle that centring on C does, from an identical board. That is why the generator measures the pool after choosing the centre rather than before — and it is why the first thing worth doing on a new hive is to look at the centre letter and ask what usually sits next to it.