Bees in Which No Words Begin with the Center Letter

Updated 2026-06-30
Spelling Bees in which no words begin with the center letter: 81

Only 81 of the Spelling Bee puzzles to date have had this characteristic: that none of the words in the solution set began with the center letter.

In the Spelling Bee of February 1, 2024, when the letter set was U B D E H L M (pangram HUMBLED), none of the words in the solution set began with the center letter U. In the Spelling Bee forum that day, a player asked a very interesting question: "Isn't unusual to have a central letter and no word starting with that?"
We were intrigued, and LexiConnexxions posed the question to the one person we know who could provide the answer: Bill Shunn, the genius who created and maintains the amazing www.sbsolver.com site. Bill very graciously did the calculations and provided this answer to LexiConnexxions: "This was a tricky query to compose, but it turns out that situation is not as uncommon as all that. It has happened 66 times [of 2,099 puzzles, as of 2024-02-01], which is a little more than 3% of all puzzles."

In order to establish a baseline from which to easily track future instances, we backtracked to review all the Spelling Bee puzzles since the beginning, and to establish that as of 2023-12-31, 64 Spelling Bees had had this characteristic. LexiConnexxions now tracks this datum on a daily basis and updates this page as needed.
2018-2023: 64 Bees in which no words began with the center letter2024: 72025: 6
2026: 4 [as of 2026-06-30]
TOTAL: 81 [as of 2026-06-30]

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SPELLING BEES IN WHICH NO WORDS BEGIN WITH THE CENTER LETTER

2018-2023
[64 Bees]