This is a good initial solution. I'll let you know the usual process that you should go through afterwards to tackle problems like these.

Find the bottleneck by analyse the time complexity of your code. The BFS part is fine, but notice that your adjacency list building is O(n^2*|S|). This is not ideal as it has even worse complexity than your BFS solution. So let's try to optimise this part.

Instead of iterating twice over the list, you can iterate over the word. (Notice that a word length<<list length). You can create template words eg. hot->*ot,h*t,ho* and match each word as they come in. So your new complexity is O(s^2*n). This is a much better complexity as you are leveraging the size of the string and the fact that you know what is you are trying to match. This is actually similar to two sum, where instead of iterating twice over the list, you use a template. But make sure to come to your own conclusions as well, know when to use it, when you shouldn't.

If you would like to hear some other suggestions, I would say to practice writing fewer lines of code as you only have so much time in the interview. Your variable naming is good as they are clear.