The hive for 9 September 2026 puts R at the centre, ringed by P, N, L, I, U, O.
Read that ring again and notice what isn't there. No A. No E. The two most common letters in written English, both absent from the same puzzle.
That single fact makes today the leanest board we've seen in a fortnight — fewer than twenty answers in total — and it demands a completely different approach from the sprawling forty-word grids of last week.
Step oneReading the grid
- Your vowels are I, O and U.Three vowels sounds generous until you try to use them. English leans hard on A and E; strip them out and most of your instincts die on arrival. ROPE, RAIL, PEARL, PRIOR — only the last survives.
- The rare vowel clusters do the work.With I, O and U in play, the productive pairs are the ones below. Sweeping these three combinations alone accounted for a third of today's board before I tried anything else.
- OINOIR · ROIL
- OUPOUR
- UIRUIN
- Doubled L is your other friend.ROLL, RILL, UNROLL. Repeats are allowed and LL is the only double worth much here.
Step twoFinding the perfect pangram
Today's pangram is a perfect one — seven letters, each used exactly once. That's the third we've had in this run.
- TuesdayCHUNKED
- MondayBROADLY
- TodayPURLOIN
Which is exactly why I checked for it before doing anything else. The test takes ten seconds. Take the seven letters and ask whether any English word uses each precisely once. On some grids the answer is plainly no, and you save yourself a fruitless search. Today the letters were P, U, R, L, O, I, N — and the moment I wrote them in that order, the shape of a word appeared.
LOIN has no R — not a legal answer on its own
To steal. Seven letters, seven distinct letters, nothing repeated. Half the pangram is unsubmittable — but it's still the fastest route in.
The full word list
Tap any word to mark it found — it counts towards your score above.
Answers hidden — no accidental spoilers
The ones people miss
- PRONOUNSeven letters and not the pangram, which makes it today's best trap. Three O's and two N's; almost nobody tests it.
- PURLThe knitting stitch, and the reverse of a knit stitch.
- PRIONThe misfolded protein behind diseases like CJD.
- RILLA small stream or brook. Four letters, entirely forgotten.
- ROILTo stir up or make turbulent. The OI pair makes it invisible.
- NOIRThe film genre, and a legal four-letter answer.
The takeaway
Short grids reward different habits than long ones.
On a forty-word board, the risk is stopping early — you leave points on the table by not sweeping thoroughly. On a board like today's, the risk is the opposite: you keep hunting for words that were never there, because your instincts are calibrated for a language full of A's and E's.
When A and E are both missing, stop generating and start filtering. Work the vowel pairs the grid actually gives you — OI, OU, UI — and accept that the list will be short. A couple of dozen words is a complete solve today, not a failure.
And always run the perfect-pangram check first. It costs ten seconds and it either hands you the answer or rules out an entire way of searching.
Back tomorrow.