Every Music Word in Bee Sharp

The second vocabulary

Most word games treat every word the same. A four letter word is a four letter word, whether it is "toad" or "tuba". Bee Sharp does not. Buried inside the ordinary dictionary is a second, smaller vocabulary of musical terms, and finding one of those is worth more.

Building that second list turned out to be more interesting than expected. Music has been borrowing words for a thousand years, from Italian, from German, from the Caribbean, from West Africa, from studio engineers who needed a name for something that had not existed the week before. A vocabulary that includes both "psaltery" and "flanger" is a vocabulary with a strange and wonderful history.

The pages below break those 504 words into eight groups. Each one carries a short piece about that corner of music, the complete list of words Bee Sharp recognises in it, and something you cannot get anywhere else: how often each word can actually be played.

That last part comes from the puzzles themselves. Bee Sharp's letter sets are generated years in advance and locked in, which means it is possible to take any word and count exactly how many future puzzles will permit it. The answers are often surprising. Some musical words are everywhere. Others will appear once in a decade, and a handful will never appear at all.

The numbers

Those figures come from checking every one of the 3,660 puzzles scheduled between February 2026 and February 2036. Because Bee Sharp locks its letter sets in advance, the answers are already fixed.

The eight categories

How the bonus works

Any word on this list scores +3 points on top of its normal value. A four letter word normally scores 1 point, so a four letter music word scores 4. Words of five letters or more score one point per letter, so a seven letter music word scores 10.

Music words appear in purple in your found words list, so you can see at a glance how many you have caught.

New to the game? Start with how to play, or go straight to today's puzzle.