Hear a word, type it before time runs out, then spot the misspellings your own slips created.
A run has two phases. In the spelling bee your browser's voice reads 10 words aloud, each with a short definition that is also shown on screen; the word itself is not shown. Type the spelling and press Enter. Easy words get 18 seconds, medium 22 and hard 28, and the clock shrinks by up to 5 seconds as the run goes on. Running out of time counts as a miss. Capital letters don't matter.
After each answer the game shows the correct spelling. Every word you miss goes into the lightning round twice: once spelled correctly and once as a decoy. The decoy is the word's well-known sound-alike when it has one (miss their and you will see there), otherwise a slip of the kind typists make: a doubled, dropped or swapped letter, or one vowel changed. The words appear one at a time in shuffled order, each with the definition of the word you were asked for, and you keep each correct spelling and reject each decoy. If you spell all 10 words, the lightning round uses the run's first three words instead.
Scoring: 100 points per word spelled; up to 500 for the share of lightning decisions you get right; and a speed bonus of up to 300, worth the full amount if the whole run averages 4 seconds per word or less and nothing at 20 seconds or more, then multiplied by the share of words you spelled.
You play the Daily run at an average of 7 seconds per word, counting the lightning round. You spell 9 of the 10 words, but for "belonging to them" you type there, so you have 900 points from the bee.
The lightning round shows the two spellings in shuffled order, each with the definition "belonging to them": their and there. You keep their and reject there, 2 correct decisions out of 2, so you get all 500 lightning points. The speed bonus is 300 × (20 − 7) ÷ 16 × 9 ÷ 10 = 219.375, rounded to 219. Total: 900 + 500 + 219 = 1,619.
Had you rejected their by mistake, you would have 1 of 2 right: 250 lightning points and 1,369 in all. A perfect bee at the same pace would score 1,000 + 500 + 244 (the full-pace bonus of 243.75, rounded) = 1,744.
Beeline trains spelling in two directions: producing a word you have only heard, and judging a written spelling someone else produced, the way a proofreader does.
A bee was a gathering of neighbours for a shared task, like a quilting bee or a husking bee; the word probably comes from a dialect word for help given by neighbours (Wikipedia: spelling bee, etymology). Spelling contests were called "spelling matches" by 1808, and "spelling bee" appears in print by 1850. They spread through American schools in the 19th century alongside Noah Webster's Blue-backed Speller, first published in 1786 (history).
The National Education Association held what it called the first national spelling bee in 1908, and The Courier-Journal of Louisville, Kentucky, started today's national competition in 1925; Frank Neuhauser won it by spelling gladiolus (Scripps National Spelling Bee). The clock came later: since 2004 the national bee has given each speller a time limit per word, cut to 90 seconds in 2023, during which the speller may ask for the definition or a sentence (rules of the oral rounds). Beeline gives the definition straight away and a much shorter clock.
The lightning round is Beeline's own addition. Its decoys come from two well-documented causes of misspelling: homophones, which a spell checker cannot catch because each is a real word (homophones), and typing slips such as doubled, dropped and transposed letters (typing errors). Spelling a word you hear means recalling it, while judging a word you see means recognising it, which psychologists treat as a different kind of memory retrieval (recognition memory).
Beeline is an original PlayPendium game. It was built around one idea: the words you get wrong should come back for a second look, this time as a proofreading test. It runs in any modern browser with sound, needs no install or account, and keeps a daily leaderboard.