5 Letter Words With Double Letters

4,465 of 12,478 five-letter words repeat a letter

Start with the raw count, because it is the single most useful fact on this page. The dictionary behind this tool holds 12,478 valid five-letter words. Of those, 4,465 — 35.78% — contain at least one letter that appears more than once. The other 8,013 words, 64.22% of the set, are built from five different letters.

That split is unusual. Roughly a third of all five-letter words repeat a letter, which means "does this word have a double?" is one of the most reliable structural questions you can ask about an unknown word. It is a question you cannot ask about a three-letter word and cannot meaningfully ask about a seven-letter word, because as the word gets longer the probability of a repeat drops fast.

Inside the 4,465, the repeats fall into exactly three shapes, and they never overlap:

4,024 plus 318 plus 123 comes back to 4,465, so the three modes in the tool above are a clean partition rather than overlapping buckets. Ninety percent of double-letter words are the simple case: one pair, three singletons.

Why a doubled letter is the strongest constraint you can own

Here is the case for caring about doubles at all. In a six-guess daily puzzle, a guess is a statement you make to the board about what the answer contains. A good guess makes a statement that would be surprising if it were false, because surprising claims are the ones worth spending a turn on.

A vowel guess is a weak statement. Take SLATE. It tells you that S, L, A, T and E are the five letters under test, and in the worst case it returns one yellow A and four greys. One yellow A out of 12,478 five-letter words barely moves the board. A vowel is common enough that learning it is not much of a revelation — E appears in 6,441 words in this dictionary, S in 6,427 and A in 5,738. A guess that tests three of the four commonest letters at once tells you very little about the shape of the answer.

A doubled letter is a much sharper statement, because it bundles two facts into one turn: the letter is present, and it is present twice. Those two facts together cut far more than a single yellow tile. In this dictionary, 4,465 words have a double and 8,013 do not. So "the answer has a repeat" is a statement that is false for nearly two thirds of the board, and a guess that turns out to be right about the shape collapses the search space in a single step.

Think about what a double actually tells you. If you guess APPLE and both P tiles come back green, you know the answer has exactly two Ps and you know one of them is in position three and the other in position four. That is a position-level constraint, not a mere letter-presence constraint, and the board never hands you anything like it for a single letter.

Compare that with a broad, undifferentiated guess. Guessing MOIST tells you, at best, that I is somewhere in the word. Guessing ABBEY tells you that B sits in the second slot, it tells you whether a second B exists at all, and it tells you that E and Y are absent. The second guess constrains four of the five slots at once.

That is the whole argument, and it is why solvers keep a list like this one open next to the board. When you know a doubled letter is in play, the candidate set collapses into shapes you can reason about: _E_E_, __EE_, _LL__, ABB__. The next section explains the catch.

The two-of-the-same-letter rule, and why a double is an expensive guess

Here is the other half, and it works against you. In the standard daily five-letter puzzle, the feedback rules include a specific rule for duplicates: if your guess contains the same letter twice and the answer contains only one copy of it, the second tile is marked as not present — even though the letter itself is present.

That rule exists because of information, not pedantry. A second tile showing a letter you already hold tells you nothing you did not know. If your first guess had a green E, another E in a later guess cannot be informative about whether E is in the answer; you already know that. So the puzzle refuses to reward the repeat. It only tells you the count, and the count is a fact you could not otherwise get.

Translate that into cost. A doubled guess spends one of your six turns, and the turn is only worth it if the two copies of the letter tell you something new. They do when the letter is new to you: guessing OTTER when you have no O yet tells you O is in the word and that it occurs twice. They do not when you already hold that letter: a second E tile in a later guess confirms nothing beyond a count you may already have narrowed.

So the honest summary is this. A doubled letter is a very strong constraint and a moderately expensive guess. It is exactly the kind of information you want the answer to have, and exactly the kind of information you do not want to buy at full price with a tile you already own. Use it as a filter on what the answer must look like, and use it as a guess only while the letter is still new to your board.

Concretely: guessing OTTER when you have no O yet tells you O is present and that it occurs twice, which is a fact you could not have extracted any other way. Guessing OTTER again on your next turn, when O is already green somewhere on your board, tells you almost nothing new. The first is a good buy. The second is a wasted turn.

Where the pair sits: in the middle or at the end

Not every double is the same shape, and the shape changes how the pair behaves under feedback. Split the 4,465 by where the repeated letter falls.

About 245 words — 5.49% of the set — carry their pair in the final two slots: AGREE, CHILL, TRUSS, STAFF, FLOSS, DWELL, SMALL, SPELL, GLASS, BRASS. In these, the last two letters are identical, so the word ends on a doubled sound or a doubled consonant cluster. The remaining 4,220 put the repeated letter somewhere in the first four slots: the LL at the front of LLAMA, the BB in ABBEY, the BB in ABBOT, the RR in BERRY, the TT in OTTER, the EE in QUEEN, or the scattered As in ABACK. Nine of the 245 — AALII, ALLEE, AMASS, BABOO, COOEE, MAMEE, RAREE, TUTEE and WOWEE — carry a second doubled letter as well, so they belong to the two-pair shape too.

The two shapes are not equally likely, and the published answers are not evenly split either. Of the 1,994 published daily answers, 619 contain a repeated letter, and 64 of those 619 — 10.34% — put the pair in the last two slots. That is nearly double the 5.49% share in the full dictionary. A trailing double is rarer in the general word list than it is among the words a puzzle editor actually picks.

Whether that is worth exploiting is a genuine argument rather than a settled fact. The case for caring about a trailing double is that it is highly specific: a pair in slots four and five is a narrow shape that many boards will never reach, so if you have any reason to think the answer ends on a doubled letter, guessing CHILL is far better than guessing a general word. The case against is that the reason to think it is usually thin. A trailing double is not a common enough pattern to build an opener around, and the dictionary share of 5.49% means you would be betting one of six turns on a shape that only about one word in eighteen has.

The middle position is the safer of the two for a different reason. In the exactly-one-pair set, the pair sits in slots one and two in 1,258 words, in slots two and three in 1,336, in slots three and four in 1,216, and in slots four and five in only 214. The three inner positions are close to equally likely, which means a guess that carries a doubled letter somewhere in the middle is not betting on one position. It is betting on a position range, and that range is populated.

There is one more wrinkle. A doubled letter is not always adjacent. Of the 4,465, only 1,727 have the two copies sitting side by side. The other 2,738 scatter them — ABACA holds two As at opposite ends, ABACK and AFRAD hold their two As apart. In the published answers the same split shows up in miniature: 277 answers have an adjacent double and 342 have a scattered one. This matters for guessing, because a guess can only test adjacency when the copies are actually next to each other. A guess like LEVEL tests two doubles at once and pays for both, while a guess like ABACK tests one scattered pair that is far less likely to be the answer's shape.

Which letters double most often

The chip row above recomputes these counts from the live dictionary, and the pattern is stable enough to state plainly. Here is the ranking of how many words double each letter, counted across all 4,465 double-letter words.

The top of that list is not a surprise once you look at it, because it is the same order as general letter frequency. E, S, A and O are the four commonest letters in English five-letter words, so they are also the four most commonly doubled. E alone accounts for 890 of the 4,465 — 19.93% of the whole set. L is interesting at 246, because L is far less common overall than T or R yet doubles almost as often, since the LL and -LLED shapes are so productive in English.

The bottom of that list is where it gets useful for guessing. Q is never doubled — not one of the 12,478 words contains two Qs, so a double-Q guess is automatically wrong. X is doubled exactly once, in XEROX. J is doubled exactly twice, in HAJJI and JUJUS. W appears in ten double words and V in nineteen. If you want to guess a rare-letter double, the field is microscopic, and in the case of Q and X it is empty or nearly so.

One number needs a footnote. The per-letter counts add up to slightly more than 4,465, because 326 words double two different letters at once: the 318 two-pair words, plus eight triples of the shape three-plus-two such as ANANA, COCCO and ESSES. A word like LEVEL is counted once under L and once under E.

What this ranking buys you is a way to spend an opener. If you have decided to test a double, the odds are on E, S, A or O, and the board is far more likely to reward a doubled vowel than a doubled consonant.

Triples: 123 words, and why guessing one is a poor plan

Only 123 of the 12,478 words — 0.9857% — contain a letter three or more times. E is tripled in 37 of them, A in 13, S in 12, T in 8, L and P in 7 each. The rest of the alphabet barely appears, and H, I, J, K, Q, V, W, X and Y never do. One small discrepancy is worth naming: switch the tool to that mode and the E chip reads 38 rather than 37, because the chips count a letter that appears at least twice, and ESSES carries a doubled E beside a tripled S. MAMMA and NANNA do the same for A, which is why its chip reads 15 rather than 13.

The words are memorable once you see them. ERROR has three Es. PEEPE, RESEE, REEDE, MELEE and DEEVE all carry three Es in five slots. BOBBY, POPPY and PUPPY carry three of a second letter. SISSY, ASSES, ESSES, TUTTI, MAMMA, MOMMY and MUMMY each have a triple. AFARA, AGAMA, ANANA, ASANA, ABACA, ABAKA and ABAYA run three As. ADDED hides three Ds at positions two, three and five, which is the kind of shape that makes a triple list feel bigger than 123 words.

Fourteen of the published daily answers have a triple: DADDY, EERIE, EMCEE, ERROR, FLUFF, GEESE, MOMMY, MUMMY, NANNY, PEEVE, POPPY, PUPPY, SASSY and SISSY. A triple is rare in the answers too — 14 in 1,994, or 0.70% — but the ones that turn up are ordinary English rather than the dictionary's exotic tail, and the shape is memorable enough that players who know these fourteen have a real edge when a board goes quiet. It is still not worth betting a whole turn on.

Here is the argument against guessing a triple. A triple word needs three tiles to land at once, so a single guess confirms at most a narrow sliver of the 123, and the other 122 remain live unless you also learn the other letters. The 123 words themselves are concentrated in a few families — the -OBBY and -OPPY shapes, the -ADDY and -ADDED shapes, the -EERIE and -EERE shapes, the -EESE and -EEKE shapes, and the -AMMA and -UMMY shapes — and the biggest of those families holds only four words, so a guess aimed at one family tests a pattern that a handful of words share. Compare that with the double case, where 4,024 words share the general shape, and a doubled guess narrows the board by a much wider margin. A triple is a filter, not an opener.

Scrabble: doubles are cheap, and that changes the value of this list

Every word in the list is legal Scrabble material too, but the reasons to want it are different. In Scrabble a doubled letter is usually a 1-point tile: L, S, E, T, A, I, O, N, R and U all score 1, and those are the letters that double most often. Two Ls are 2 points. Two Ees are 2 points. The pair is nearly free, which is exactly why English has so many of them.

Free is not the same as good. A doubled tile is dead weight on a seven-tile rack, and a rack holding two copies of the same letter is a rack that can only be played as a word containing that letter twice. On a Scrabble board that is a real constraint: you either find a bingo through the double or you are holding half a letter. The same constraint that makes doubles informative in a guessing game makes them annoying in a tile game.

The scoreboard shows it. The average Scrabble value across the 4,465 double-letter words is 8.98 points, slightly below the 9.17 average for the whole 12,478-word dictionary. Doubles are not where the points are. The top of the repeat list in value is PZAZZ at 34 points, because two Zs on a triple-letter square is a different kind of idea entirely, and BIZZY and BUZZY sit at 28. The ordinary doubles — APPLE at 9, HELLO at 8, LEVEL at 8 — are worth what they look like.

The practical use of this list in Scrabble is not hunting bingos. It is the boring, valuable use: a rack with two Ls, or a tile bin with three identical letters, needs a word that uses them, and this is a filtered catalogue of every such word in the 12,478. Run the filter, drop the result into our Scrabble solver, and check the placements.

Worked examples: reading the pattern in real double words

It helps to look at the shapes rather than the statistics for a moment.

APPLE doubles the P and places the pair in the middle. ABBEY doubles the B in slots two and three. The clearest one-pair examples are ABBOT, BERRY, OTTER, TWEED, SWEET, SPEED, SHEEP, OCCUR, QUEEN, BELLS, SILLY, HELLO, THERE, CROSS, TRUSS and CHILL — one pair, three singletons, the 90.12% case.

LEVEL, QUEUE, SEEDS, DEEDS, MIMIC and JUJUS are the two-pair shape: two different letters each appear twice, and the fifth letter appears once. These are the words that trip up a solver written only for "exactly one pair", because a guess of LEVEL leaves you with two greens and an ambiguous yellow rather than a single clean answer.

ERROR, PEEPE, MELEE, DEEVE, REEDE, RESEE, EERIE, FEEZE, BOBBY, POPPY, SISSY, MUMMY, TUTTI, ASSES, GEESE, ADDED, ABACA, ANANA… and so on through 123 of them, carry a letter three or more times.

And then there is the pair that is not adjacent. ABACA holds two As at opposite ends of the word. ABACK holds two As in slots one and three, and ABRAM holds them in slots one and four. The scattered pattern survives plenty of times inside five letters: two copies of a letter separated by one or two other letters. Among the 4,465, 2,738 are scattered rather than adjacent, so a doubled letter you have spotted in the answer may not be sitting next to itself.

One more shape worth naming: XEROX is the only five-letter word in the dictionary that doubles an X, HAJJI and JUJUS are the only two that double a J, and no five-letter word doubles a Q at all. When a filter returns nothing, that is the list telling you the word does not exist rather than the tool failing.

Combining a double with a vowel

A double and a vowel together make a very narrow shape, and working that out is most of the practical value of this list. In the exactly-one-pair set of 4,024 words, 1,870 double a vowel and 2,154 double a consonant. The vowel doubles are the more interesting half, because a vowel you have already placed narrows the shape as well.

Take E, the most common doubled letter, with 890 words. Of those, 659 contain no vowel other than the doubled E pair. That is a large, specific family: BECKE, BEDEL, BEECH, BEEFS, BEEFY, BEEPS, BEERS, BEERY, BEETS, BEGET, BELLE, BERET, BESET, BETEL, BEVEL, BEVER, BLEED, BLEEP, BREDE, BREED — 659 words whose only vowel is the doubled E. If your board has a green E and the answer is a double, this is where the answer lives.

The mental search is straightforward once the shape is named. Double E means the word looks like EE___, E_E__, E__E_, E___E, _EE__, _E_E_, _E__E, __EE_, __E_E or ___EE — ten possible shapes, and the tool's filter turns each one into a list you can read. Add the vowels you have already ruled out and each shape collapses fast. Double E with no other vowel and a known B in slot one leaves a short, recognisable family; double E with a second vowel present, of which there are 214 such words with exactly one other vowel, is a different and slightly wider search.

Do the same for S, the second most doubled letter with 696 words. S doubles in its own family — ASSES, ESSES, SISSY, MISSY, GASSY, SASSY, FUSSY, HUSSY, KISSY, MUSSY, PUSSY, TOSSY and MOSSY — and in consonant skeletons that use a single E, as in the -ESS and -ASS endings such as GUESS, GLOSS, CROSS and BRASS. The point is that a doubled letter plus one known vowel is a narrower filter than either one alone, and the tool's "Must include these letters" box is built for exactly that combination. Type ee to require two Es, add o to require an O as well, and you have described a shape you can actually read off the board.

What this list is, and what it is not

Two limits, stated plainly.

First, this is the site's own dictionary of 12,478 valid five-letter words. It is an acceptance list, not an answer list. Most of the 4,465 are perfectly good guesses, and plenty of them are words a puzzle editor would never choose. Only 619 of the 1,994 published daily answers — 31.04% — contain a repeated letter at all, so only about one word in seven of the 4,465 has ever been the solution. Use the list to shape a search, not to guess a winner.

Second, the counts here describe this dictionary, and the published answers behave differently in places. Answers are more likely to end in a double — 10.34% of the 619 double-letter answers against 5.49% of the 4,465 dictionary words — and the triples that do appear are ordinary English rather than the dictionary's exotic tail: ERROR, FLUFF, GEESE, SASSY, SISSY, DADDY, PEEVE and the rest of the fourteen all sit comfortably in the common-vocabulary middle of the language. Fourteen answers out of 1,994 is 0.70% of the answer set, a little under the dictionary's 0.9857%, which is what you would expect from a curated list that favours familiar words over word-game rarities.

How to use this list in practice

A short sequence that plays out well.

Open the puzzle. If the first guess returns a yellow or a grey for a letter you already hold, remember that the answer may still contain that letter twice — a doubled guess would have shown you that, which is why the rule exists. If a letter comes back green and you suspect a second copy, switch the tool to Exactly one pair and click that letter's chip. Add the letters you have ruled out in the include box, and type a letter twice when you need two copies of it. Sort Z–A to work down the list from the back of the alphabet. Copy the result and work down it.

For Scrabble, the same tool answers a different question: given a rack with two of the same letter, what are the legal five-letter plays? Filter by the doubled letter, and the answer set is short enough to read. If you want a broader sweep for a specific board position, the Scrabble solver handles rack and square values.

For everything that is not about doubles, start from the complete five-letter word list, or let the five-letter word generator work from a pattern such as _E__E. The word finder covers anagrams and pattern matches across the same dictionary, and the daily hints page is where to start if you would rather be handed today's puzzle than solve it blind.

One last note for letter-shaped browsing. The full lists are broken out by opening letter — see the A-words page for the 715 words that start with A, of which 331 repeat a letter somewhere and 93 of those put the two copies side by side. The Wordle solver applies the duplicate-letter rule to your actual board feedback, which is the right tool once you have real tiles to work with.