Letter Boxed Solver

What Is Letter Boxed?

Letter Boxed is a daily word puzzle from The New York Times. Twelve letters sit around a square, three per side. You spell words by drawing lines between letters, but with a twist: consecutive letters in a word must come from different sidesof the box, so you can never use two letters from the same side back to back. Each new word must start with the last letter of the previous word, chaining your solution together. The goal is to use all 12 letters in as few words as possible — the puzzle suggests a par (“try to solve it in 5 words”), and expert players aim for two.

How to Use the Letter Boxed Solver

1. Type the 12 letters into the square — three per side, matching your puzzle’s layout. (Side order doesn’t change the answers; only which letters share a side matters.)
2. Click Solve. The dictionary downloads once (about 1.7 MB), then solving takes well under a second.
3. Read the two-word tab first — pairs are ranked by total letters, shortest first, and the second word always starts with the first word’s last letter.
4. No two-word answer? Open the 3 words tab. It opens automatically when the box has no pair solution, and lists chained three-word answers shortest first.
5. Want a nudge, not a spoiler? Turn on hint mode to see only each word’s first letter and length.

How the Solver Works

The solver first filters the ENABLE word list down to words playable on your box: every letter must be one of your 12, and no two consecutive letters may share a side. That typically leaves 1,000–2,000 playable words. Each word is then encoded as a 12-bit mask — one bit per letter of the box — so “does this pair of words cover all 12 letters?” becomes a single bitwise OR.

One-word solutions are words whose mask is already complete. For two-word solutions, words are indexed by first letter; for each candidate first word, the solver scans only the words starting with its last letter and keeps every pair whose combined mask covers the box. The search is exhaustive — every valid pair is found — and still runs in tens of milliseconds on a 168,000-word dictionary because the bitmask check is a single CPU instruction per pair.

Three-word chains are a much bigger search, so they get extra pruning. For every starting letter the solver precomputes a table answering “can any word starting with this letter supply this exact set of missing letters?” in one lookup, so most half-finished chains are thrown out immediately. Middle words that add no new letters are treated as bridges and only the shortest bridge to each letter is kept, and every word list is sorted shortest first so the search can stop as soon as a chain can no longer beat the answers already found. The result is the 200 shortest three-word chains in well under a second.

Worked Example

Load the example box (top A U R, right B C S, bottom E W H, left O T Y) and click Solve. The best answer is cubes → seaworthy — 14 letters total. CUBES ends in S, SEAWORTHY starts with S, and between them they touch all 12 letters. Notice how SEAWORTHY does the heavy lifting: long words that zigzag across all four sides are the backbone of most two-word solutions.

Strategy: Finding Two-Word Solutions Yourself

• Start with the awkward consonants. Letters like J, Q, X, Z and V appear in few words — find a word that covers them first, then fill in the rest.
• Hunt for a long “coverage” word. A single 8–10 letter word that touches 8+ of the 12 letters leaves an easy cleanup word.
• Mind the pivot letter. Your first word’s last letter is your second word’s first letter. Words ending in S, R, T or E give you the most options to chain into.
• Repeated letters are free. You only need to use each letter once, but you may reuse letters as often as you like within and across words.
• Can’t find two? Three short words beat one forced, obscure pair — and some boards have no two-word solution at all. The 3 words tab lists those chains for you, and the all-words list is great for building your own.

Frequently Asked Questions