Blossom Answers Today: Pangram & Best Words

How to Play Blossom

Blossom is Merriam-Webster's daily word game: seven letters bloom on a flower — six petals around one center — and you build words of four or more letters that always include the center letter, submitting exactly 12 words for the highest score you can manage.

The twist that separates it from every lookalike is the bonus petal. Each round, one petal turns yellow, and every use of that letter in your word adds 5 points. The bonus rotates as you play, so the same word can be worth wildly different amounts depending on when you play it — and that timing decision, not raw vocabulary, is where high scores come from.

• Words: at least 4 letters, center letter required, letters may repeat freely.
• Scoring: 4 letters = 2 points, 5 = 4, 6 = 6, 7 = 12, and every letter past seven adds 3 more. The bonus letter pays 5 per appearance; a pangram adds 7 on top.
• Budget: 12 words a day, no more. When they're spent, the flower closes until tomorrow.

A new board goes live on merriam-webster.com every day, and this page refreshes with it — flower, counts, pangram and full word list included.

How to Score 500+ in Blossom

Casual play tops out around 200 points. Breaking 400-500 is almost entirely about respecting the 12-word budget and the rotating bonus:

1. Land the pangram early

The featured pangram is usually the board's thematic anchor — today's is always in the reveal above. Beyond its own 19+ points, finding it first tells you which long stems the board supports, and most other big scorers are its relatives (the same stem with prefixes and suffixes attached).

2. Match heavy words to their bonus round

This is the skill ceiling. A word with three N's played on an N-bonus round banks 15 extra points; the identical word one round earlier banks none. Before submitting anything, scan your candidate for its most-repeated letter and ask whether that petal's round is coming. Our best-word-per-bonus table above shows exactly how big the swing is — the same board's optimum shifts by 10-20 points depending on the yellow petal.

3. Stretch every stem

Because letters repeat freely and every letter past seven pays 3, the difference between good and great is suffix greed: if TENDED works, ATTENDED and CONTENTED probably do too. Always test the longer form before settling.

4. Never waste a slot on a 4-letter word

Two points against a 12-word budget is a self-inflicted wound unless it's a bonus-stacked special case. If you can't find a fifth letter, shuffle the petals — a 12-word game averaging 6+ letters per word is how the 500 club plays.

Blossom vs Spelling Bee: Same Flower, Different Game

At first glance Blossom looks like the NYT Spelling Bee in a garden: seven letters, mandatory center, pangram glory. The differences change how you should think entirely:

• Word budget. Spelling Bee rewards finding everything; Blossom gives you 12 submissions, full stop. One is a completionist hunt, the other is a portfolio-selection problem.
• The rotating bonus. Nothing like it exists in Spelling Bee. It adds a timing layer — the same word has different values on different turns — that makes ordering as important as vocabulary.
• Dictionary personality. Both games curate, but Merriam-Webster's list runs deeper into technical and dialect words. Today's list above regularly includes entries Spelling Bee would never accept — skim it and you'll learn a few.
• Fail state. Spelling Bee can't be lost, only abandoned. In Blossom a wasted short word is 40+ points you'll never get back, which is why the strategy section above keeps hammering the budget.

If you enjoy both, play Spelling Bee for breadth and Blossom for precision — the two dictionaries cross-train each other nicely.

About This Page — From the Game's Own Data

Most Blossom answer pages are hand-solved each morning, which means missed pangrams and incomplete lists. This page is generated from the game's own published puzzle data: the exact seven letters, the featured pangram Merriam-Webster chose, and the complete accepted word list — every entry above is guaranteed playable, and the counts are exact, not estimates.

We add the part no one else computes: the optimal word for each possible bonus petal, using the game's real scoring formula. Take the hints gradually if you want to earn the board yourself — the reveal stays shut until you click it.

Blossom FAQ

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