Amal Augustine
Founder, Spelling Better
Amal Augustine is the founder of Spelling Better, an innovative learning app designed to help students improve their spelling, vocabulary, and language skills through interactive and engaging methods.
He graduated from St. Stephen’s College, University of Delhi and is currently pursuing his Master’s degree at National Sun Yat-sen University, Taiwan, focusing on research and technology-driven learning.
A quiz enthusiast, Amal has won 50+ national-level quiz competitions. He enjoys reading science journals, programming, and exploring Computer Science innovations. Through Spelling Better, he aims to make vocabulary learning simple, enjoyable, and meaningful.
Follow the Rare Letter: NYT Spelling Bee 25 September 2026 — DEVIANCE
Today's hive is a Latin scholar's playground. Almost everything on the list is a word English borrowed from Rome by way of French — cadence, evidence, advance, decadence — and they all behave the same way. Once you notice that, the pangram stops hiding.
But the fastest route in isn't the Latin. It's the V.
Tap a letter to filter the word list
How I solved it
I filtered my list down to one letter
Every pangram must use every tile, so every pangram today contains a V. And V is the scarcest letter on this board — it turns up in a fraction of the valid words.
So instead of scanning the whole board, I scanned only the words with a V in them. That's the whole trick: let the rare letter shrink your list before you start thinking.
I subtracted to find what was missing
Working down that shortlist, I checked each word against the full pool of seven and noted the gaps. Tap any candidate to run the same subtraction:
covered missing
DEVICE is short by A and N. EVINCE is short by A and D. Two near-misses, both missing exactly two letters — that's the signal you're one small step from the answer.
Two missing letters are usually a suffix
A and N, in that order, sit at the head of one of the most common endings in this entire hive: –ANCE. Look at the list — ADVANCE, CADENCE, DECADENCE, INCIDENCE, EVIDENCE. This board is an abstract-noun factory.
So I took the V-root and gave it the ending the hive kept suggesting:
Eight letters, all seven tiles, the E used twice.
Filter your answers by the rarest letter, subtract each one from the full pool, and read the leftovers. Two missing letters are almost never random — they're the start of a suffix.
Every word in today's hive
Tap a word once you've found it and the bar above keeps score. Each group stays hidden until you ask for it, so you can take one length at a time. The pangram is marked ✦.
Word of the day
Vivace
adverb · a tempo marking — briskly, and with spirit
Faster than allegro, and livelier in character than speed alone would suggest. It's the Italian word for lively, from the Latin vivax, meaning long-lived or vigorous. The same root gives us vivacious and revive.
In music it isn't really an instruction about pace; it's an instruction about mood.
What to carry into tomorrow
- The rarest letter is your filter. Every pangram contains it, so every word without it can be set aside immediately. A handful of candidates beats the whole board.
- Subtract, don't search. Take a promising word, remove its letters from the pool, and look at what's left. The remainder tells you what to add.
- Two leftover letters signal a suffix. A and N pointed straight at –ANCE. One leftover letter usually means an insertion; two usually mean an ending.
- Read the hive's accent. When the list is full of –ANCE and –ENCE nouns, the pangram is probably one too. Boards have a character.
- The root may not be on the list. DEVIANT has a T, so it can never appear here. The noun form still can.
Centre C · Outer I N V A E D · Pangram DEVIANCE
See you at tomorrow's hive.