Top 10 Hardest and Easiest Spelling Bee Words, Sept. 23-29

Note: If you plan to play Spelling Bee’s Past Puzzles from the last week, this list may contain spoilers.

This week, trigram — a group of three letters, such as “tri” — was the least-found word by players of Spelling Bee, followed by tangram and trimaran. Whipping was the easiest word to find.

This data is based on visitors to Spelling Bee Buddy, a tool that shows hints and statistics for each word as you play Spelling Bee, and covers Saturday, Sept. 23, to Friday, Sept. 29. (Users of the tool are among the puzzle’s most dedicated solvers, so these percentages are probably higher than they would be for all Spelling Bee players.)

Here are the meanings of the 10 hardest words that have also been used in Times articles.

1. trigram — a group of three letters:

2. tangram — a puzzle with seven shapes that form a square:

3. trimaran — a boat with three hulls:

4. coulee — a ravine:

5. toccata — a piece of music that shows off a musician’s technique, typically in the form of a keyboard or plucked string instrument:

6. clade — a group of animals with common ancestry:

7. tamarin — a small monkey from South America:

8. callaloo — a leafy green, or a West Indian soup or stew featuring it:

9. mirin — a Japanese rice wine:

10. grammarian — an expert in grammar, the structure of a language:

The list of the week’s easiest words:

Each morning, you can see which of the day’s Spelling Bee words are stumping the hivemind (without spoilers!), and track your remaining words, by visiting Spelling Bee Buddy.