About
A friendly hive for word people
Nectary is a spelling bee solver, a vocabulary reference, and a daily puzzle, made for readers, writers, students, teachers, and anyone who likes a good word with their morning coffee.
Why Nectary?
A nectary is the part of a flower that makes nectar, the sweet start of every drop of honey. Bees visit nectaries one by one and carry home a little at a time. That is how we think about words: one at a time, a little each day, until you have a whole jar.
Hints first
Seeing every answer at once ends the fun. The solver starts with a grid of counts and the first two letters of each word, then lets you reveal one word at a time: first letter and length, then a few more letters, then a clue, then the word.
Our own word list
Dictionaries disagree about which words are real. Nectary keeps its own list of accepted words, built from open sources and adjusted by hand. Words can be added or removed editorially, and the daily puzzle draws only on familiar words with a definition we can show you.
The solver accepts more than the puzzle does. Rare and technical words are hidden by default; you can include them with a checkbox.
Scoring
A word of four letters scores one point. Longer words score one point per letter. A pangram, which uses all seven letters, earns seven extra points. A perfect pangram uses each letter exactly once.
The daily puzzle
A new Nectary puzzle appears at midnight Eastern time. Each one has at least one pangram and never uses the letter S. Your progress and streaks are saved in your browser. There are no accounts and nothing to sign up for.
Want more? Unlimited deals a fresh puzzle whenever you like, from a separate pool that never overlaps the daily puzzles, so it can never spoil one. Missed a word yesterday? Yesterday’s answers are waiting.
Playing late? Tap the moon in the header for honey at night, a warm dark theme. Your choice is remembered in this browser.
Sources and credits
- Spelling: the ENABLE word list (public domain).
- Definitions, examples and related words: WordNet 3.0, © Princeton University, used under the WordNet license.
- Pronunciation: the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary, Carnegie Mellon University.
- Word frequency: wordfreq by Robyn Speer, data under Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 4.0.
- Excluded words: the List of Dirty, Naughty, Obscene, and Otherwise Bad Words (Creative Commons Attribution 4.0) plus our own additions.
Nectary is an independent project and is not affiliated with any newspaper or puzzle publisher.