5-Letter Words With No Repeated Letters (8,013)

8,013 of 12,478 five-letter words have five different letters

The headline is the opposite of what most people expect. When you think of a word with a repeated letter, the images that come to mind are HAPPY, OTTER, COMMA and PUPPY — affectionate, memorable, slightly unusual words. They are the minority. Across a dictionary of 12,478 five-letter words, 8,013 use five different letters and only 4,465 repeat one.

So the ordinary case is the unremarkable one. Roughly two words in three have five distinct letters, and roughly one in three does not. If you had to guess whether an unknown five-letter word repeated a letter, you would guess that it did not.

The arithmetic behind the split is worth setting out, because it explains why the ratio is so lopsided. A five-letter word with five different letters has 26 choices for the first letter, 25 for the second, 24 for the third, 23 for the fourth and 22 for the fifth: 7,893,600 possible strings in total. Eight thousand and thirteen of them are real English words. That is a hit rate of 0.1015%, which is almost exactly the same as the 0.105% you get for the whole dictionary once you allow letters to repeat.

The conclusion is that English does not particularly care whether a five-letter word repeats a letter. Both constraints are equally rare per string, but the number of strings that satisfy "all different" is so much smaller that most real words end up satisfying it anyway. The 4,465 repeat words are not a strange corner of the language; they are the 4,465 ways English managed to fit a doubling into five slots.

One structural point follows immediately, and it is worth knowing because people often assume the opposite. None of the 8,013 begins and ends with the same letter, because matching the first and last letters is itself a repeat. The 691 five-letter words that do begin and end with the same letter all live in the other 4,465. The two lists are completely disjoint, and between them they account for every word in the dictionary.

Which letters start a no-repeat word

The counts below are the size of each starting-letter column inside the 8,013. The third column is the more revealing one: it is the share of that letter's five-letter words that avoid a repeat, and it varies enormously.

E is the interesting row, because it is the rarest starting letter for a no-repeat word. Only 133 of the 288 five-letter words that begin with E have five different letters, a share of just 46.18% — the lowest of any letter. The reason is that E is the commonest letter in the language, and it piles up in the middle and at the end of words rather than at the front. Once you have spent the E in slot one, the remaining four slots are wide open, and there is a good chance of hitting another E: EAGLE, EAGER, EASEL, EATEN, EATER, EASED, EBOOK, EDGES, EERIE, EIDER, ELDER, ENEMY, ENTER, ERROR, ESSAY, EVENT and EVERY.

Q is the mirror image and the most extreme row in the table. 84.21% of Q-words have five different letters, because Q is so rare and so central that a Q-word is nearly always a Q followed by four distinct consonants — QUACK, QUADS, QUAIL, QUAKE, QUARK, QUART, QUASH, QUASI, QUATE, QUBIT, QUERY, QUEST, QUICK, QUIET, QUILT, QUINS, QUIPS, QUIRE, QUIRK, QUIRT, QUITE, QUITS, QUOIN, QUOIT, QUOTA and QUOTE.

S is the largest column in absolute terms, with 815 words, but it has one of the lower no-repeat shares at 53.58%. English builds plenty of S-initial words that double their S or take a doubled ending: SALAD, SALES, SALLY, SAMBA, SAGGY, SILLY, SKILL, SHELL, SPELL, SMALL, SMELL, SPOOL, SWEET and SWISS.

X is the smallest column in the whole table, with just 8 words. Only 15 five-letter words begin with X at all, and 7 of them repeat a letter — XEBEC, XENON, XEROX, XOANA, XYLOL, XYLYL and XYSTS — leaving XENIA, XENIC, XERIC, XERUS, XYLAN, XYLEM, XYLIC and XYSTI on this page. X-words are also the classic case of the letter that is cheap to spell and expensive to score.

Which letters these words end with

The ending column behaves differently from the starting column, because a word ending in a letter is far more constrained by phonology than one starting with it. English does not end many words with J, Q or V, and the no-repeat list inherits those limits.

Two features of that table deserve comment. First, not one of the 8,013 ends in J, and only two end in Q — TRANQ and UMIAQ — and just three end in V: GANEV, PAREV and SCHAV. English simply does not put those letters at the end of a word, so those columns are empty before the no-repeat filter even applies.

Second, two letters have unusually low no-repeat shares because their endings are so often doubled. A ends 286 of the 632 A-ending words, only 45.25%, because a word ending in -A so often repeats its own A: AGORA, ALOHA, ALPHA, ANANA, ARENA, AROMA, ASANA and ATRIA all do it. And F ends only 33 of the 80 F-ending words, 41.25%, because a final -F is so often preceded by a doubled letter, as in BLUFF, CHAFF, CHUFF, CLIFF, FLUFF, GRIFF, GROOF, SCAFF, SCOFF, STAFF and STUFF.

The practical reading of the whole table is this. If you are building a five-letter word and you want to be sure your five letters are all different, start with an E, S, T or R ending and check the front. Those four endings cover 4,298 of the 8,013 words, and none of them has an obvious doubling trap.

How many vowels these words have

The vowel counts across the 8,013 are close to the shape of ordinary English, with one notable tail.

4,910 words have exactly two vowels, which is 61.28% of the set and the clear default. 2,478 have exactly one, 30.92%. 592 have three, 7.39%. 24 have no A, E, I, O or U at all, and 9 have four.

The nine four-vowel words are worth listing in full, because there is no other way to find them: ADIEU, AUDIO, AULOI, AUREI, LOUIE, MIAOU, OUIJA, OURIE and URAEI. Five of the nine are of Latin or French origin, and OUIJA is a board game. AUDIO is the only one of the nine that a solver would actually produce from scratch, and it has been a published answer.

The 24 vowel-free words are also worth listing, because they are the sharpest end of the list: BYRLS, CHYND, CRWTH, CRYPT, FYRDS, GLYPH, GRYPT, GYMPS, HWYLS, HYMNS, KYDST, KYNDS, LYMPH, LYNCH, MYTHS, NYMPH, PSYCH, RYNDS, SYLPH, SYNCH, SYNTH, TRYPS, TYMPS and WYNDS.

Compare that with the 51 vowel-free five-letter words in the whole dictionary: 24 of the 51 have five different letters, and the other 27 repeat one letter, usually a Y, an S or an L. The repeat cases are DRYLY, SHYLY, SLYLY, WRYLY, FLYBY, GYNNY, GYPPY, GYPSY, MYRRH, MYTHY, PYGMY, STYMY, THYMY, TRYST, TYPPS, WYNNS, XYLYL, XYSTS, PHPHT, CWTCH, CYSTS, GHYLL, SKYFS, SKYRS, SYNCS, SYNDS and SYPHS. English copes with a missing vowel by leaning on the Y, and leaning hard enough on the Y twice breaks the no-repeat rule.

The shapes these words come in

Write a C for a consonant and a V for a vowel and the 8,013 words fall into just thirty patterns. The distribution is not even: the commonest shape, CVCVC, holds 2,138 words, which is 26.68% of the set, and the top six shapes hold more than three quarters of it.

CVCVC dominating is not a curiosity — it is the shape English writes most often. A five-letter word with two syllables and an open-then-closed rhythm is CVC-VC, and that is how a huge number of ordinary words are built: CABIN, ROBIN, TULIP, FACET, HABIT, MUSIC, PIVOT, WIDEN, RAVEN, YIELD. The six leading shapes alone account for 6,120 of the 8,013 words.

Two shapes in that table are worth a second look because they are so rare. CCCCC, five consonants in a row, has exactly 24 words — and those 24 are precisely the vowel-free words listed above, because a five-letter word with no A, E, I, O or U and no repeated letter can only be all consonants. VVCCC, two vowels followed by three consonants, has 27 more: AIRNS, AIRTH, AITCH, AUGHT, AUNTS, EARLY, EARTH and EIGHT. Between them, 51 of the 8,013 words sit in these two rare frames.

What these words are worth in Scrabble

The average Scrabble value across the 8,013 no-repeat words is 9.27 points, against 9.17 for the whole 12,478-word dictionary and 8.98 for the 4,465 words that do repeat a letter. So a no-repeat word is worth slightly more than average and about three points more than a repeat word.

The reason is simple. A doubled letter is almost always a one-point letter — L, S, E, T, A, I, O, N, R and U all score 1, and those are the letters that double most often. A word with five different letters has five separate chances to include an expensive tile, so its average goes up. That said, the distribution is still weighted low: 3,747 of the 8,013 words, 46.76%, are worth 8 points or less, and the mode is exactly 8.

The high scorers are the interesting corner. SQUIZ is worth 23 points and is the highest-scoring no-repeat five-letter word in the dictionary. Eight words score 21: ZYMIC, ZINKY, ZAXES, VOZHD, QUAKY, KHAZI, KARZY and JACKY. Eight score 20: ZACKS, WAQFS, TOWZY, QUICK, QUACK, HAFIZ, FURZY and AVYZE. And 292 words in the set are worth 16 points or more.

Notice what those words have in common. QUICK is worth 20 because of the Q and the K. WAQFS is worth 20 because of the W, the Q and the F. SQUIZ is worth 23 because of the two Qs, the Z and the I. The no-repeat rule does not make a word expensive on its own, but it does stop the expensive letters from being wasted on a duplicate, which is why the top of this list looks the way it does.

For board play, the Scrabble solver is the right tool because it handles the rack and the square values. This list is for the step before that, when you know your rack has no duplicates and you want every legal five-letter play that uses it.

What a no-repeat answer tells you in a guessing game

This is the section that makes the list worth more than a curiosity, so it is worth being precise.

Start with the base rate. Of the 1,994 published answers in the daily five-letter game, 1,375 have no repeated letter — 68.96%. Only 619, or 31.04%, contain one. So a no-repeat word is more than twice as likely to be the answer as a repeat word. If you have no information at all, the best guess is a word with five different letters, because that is the shape most answers have.

Now the reason a no-repeat answer is easier to reason about. In a standard daily game, the feedback includes a rule for duplicates: if your guess contains the same letter twice and the answer holds only one copy, the second tile comes back grey even though the letter is present. That rule exists so the game does not pay you twice for the same fact.

When you know the answer has five different letters, two things become true at once, and both of them save you guesses.

First, a yellow tile is unambiguous. With a no-repeat answer, a yellow letter is present in the answer, appears exactly once, and is not in the slot you guessed. There is never a question about whether a second copy is hiding somewhere else, because there is no second copy. Every yellow you collect is a firm fact, and you can spend it immediately.

Second, a grey after a green is decisive. If a letter comes back green and then a later guess carries the same letter in a different slot and comes back grey, you know the answer holds exactly one copy of that letter. That single observation removes the whole double-letter branch from your search.

Here is the mechanism, stated as a rule you can follow. Count your copies. If a letter has come back grey once, it is not in the answer at all. If it has come back green once and grey once, the answer holds exactly one copy — so the answer is a no-repeat word as far as that letter is concerned. If it has come back yellow twice in two different guesses, the answer holds at least two copies, and it is a repeat word. The game's duplicate rule means you cannot see two greens of the same letter, so a second yellow is the only way to learn that a letter doubles.

That is why a no-repeat list is a filter and not an opener. If you have already seen a letter come back green and then grey, you have narrowed the answer to the 8,013 words on this page, and you can drop every candidate that repeats a letter you have already confirmed is doubled. If instead you have seen a letter come back yellow twice, you have narrowed to the 4,465 on the double-letter page instead, and you should stop reading this list.

One more practical note about the answer set itself. The published no-repeat answers are not distributed like the dictionary. Among the 1,350 distinct no-repeat answers, E ends 282 of them and S ends only 9 — the plural and third-person -S forms that dominate the S-ending column of the dictionary mostly double an S and drop out. S still starts 213 of them. The lesson is that the answer pool leans on S at the front and E at the back, and the middle is where the work is.

Where these words come from

This site keeps a separate list of 1,170 everyday five-letter words, drawn from ordinary usage rather than from the game lexicon. 815 of them have five different letters — 69.66% — and 355 repeat a letter. The ratio is almost exactly the same as the full dictionary's 64.22%, which tells you something useful: the doubling rate is a property of English, not an artefact of the game lexicon.

The 355 everyday words that do repeat a letter are a good sample of what doubling looks like in ordinary speech. ADDED, AGAIN, AGING, AGREE, AHEAD, ALARM, ALIAS, ALLOW, ALLOY, ALPHA, ANNEX, APART, APPLE, APPLY, ARBOR, AREAS, ARENA, ARMOR, ARRAY, ARROW, ASSET, ATLAS, AWARD, AWARE, BASES, BASIS, BELLE, BELLY, BERRY, BIBLE, BILLS, BLESS, BLOOD, BLOOM, BOOKS, BOOST, BOOTH, BOOTS, BRASS, BREED, BROOK, BUDDY, BUNNY, BUSES, CACHE, CALLS, CANAL, CANON, CARRY, CASES, CATCH, CELLS, CHECK, CHESS, CHICK, CHUCK, CIVIC, CIVIL, CLASS, CLICK, CLIFF, CLOCK, COACH, COLON, COLOR, COMBO, COMIC, CONDO, CONGO, COSTS, CRACK, CREEK, CROSS, CUBIC, CYCLE, DADDY, DATED, DENSE, DEVEL, DIGIT, DISCS, DISKS, DODGE, DOLLS, DONNA, DONOR, DOORS, DRAMA, DRESS, DRIED, DRILL, DRYER, EAGLE, EDGES, ELDER, ELECT, ELITE, ENDED, ENEMY, ENTER, ERROR, ESSAY, EVENT, EVERY, EXCEL, FALLS, FATAL, FATTY, FEEDS, FEELS, FENCE, FERRY, FEVER, FEWER, FIFTH, FIFTY, FLEET, FLOOD, FLOOR, FOODS, FULLY, FUNNY, FUZZY, GAMMA, GAUGE, GENES, GENRE, GLASS, GOING, GOODS, GRASS, GREEK, GREEN, GRILL, GROSS, GUESS, HAPPY, HARRY, HEATH, HELLO, HENCE, HIGHS, HILLS, HOBBY, HOLLY, HONOR, HOSTS, INDIE, INNER, ISSUE, JAPAN, JENNY, JERRY, JESSE, JEWEL, JIMMY, KARMA, KEEPS, KELLY, KERRY, KILLS, KITTY, KNOCK, KNOWN, LABEL, LAURA, LEASE, LEAVE, LEGAL, LEONE, LEVEL, LIMIT, LISTS, LOBBY, LOCAL, LOGOS, LOOKS, LOOPS, LOOSE, MAMBO, MARIA, MEETS, MERGE, MERRY, METER, MILLS, MODEM, MOTOR, NANCY, NAVAL, NEEDS, NERVE, NEVER, NEWER, NYLON, OASIS, OCCUR, OFFER, ONION, ORDER, OZONE, PAPER, PASTA, PEACE, PEERS, PENNY, PERRY, PETER, PHOTO, PIECE, PILLS, PIPES, PIZZA, PLAZA, POLLS, POOLS, POSTS, PRESS, PRIOR, PROMO, PROOF, PUMPS, PUPPY, QUEEN, QUEUE, RADAR, RALLY, REBEL, REFER, RENEW, RESET, RETRO, RIDER, RISKS, RIVER, ROBOT, ROGER, ROLLS, ROOMS, ROOTS, ROSES, ROVER, RURAL, SALAD, SALES, SALLY, SAMBA, SAVES, SCENE, SCOOP, SEATS, SEEDS, SEEKS, SEEMS, SELLS, SENDS, SENSE, SERVE, SEVEN, SHALL, SHEEP, SHEER, SHEET, SHELL, SHIPS, SHOES, SHOOT, SHOPS, SHOTS, SHOWS, SIDES, SIGNS, SILLY, SITES, SIZES, SKILL, SKINS, SLEEP, SLOTS, SMALL, SMELL, SOCKS, SONGS, SORRY, SORTS, SOULS, SPECS, SPEED, SPELL, SPIES, SPOTS, STAFF, STARS, START, STATE, STATS, STAYS, STEEL, STEPS, STILL, STOOD, STOPS, STUFF, SUITS, SUNNY, SWEET, SWISS, TASKS, TASTE, TEDDY, TEENS, TEETH, TELLS, TERRY, TESTS, TEXTS, THEFT, THEME, THERE, THESE, THETA, THREE, TIGHT, TITLE, TOMMY, TOOLS, TOOTH, TOTAL, TRACT, TREAT, TREES, TROUT, TRUST, TRUTH, TWIST, UNION, UPPER, USERS, USUAL, VALVE, VENUE, VERSE, VILLA, VISIT, WALLS, WATTS, WEEKS, WELLS, WHEEL, WHERE, WHICH, WOODS, WORRY, XEROX, YAHOO.

Look at that list and a pattern appears. Almost every one is either an inflected form — -ED, -ES, -S — or a compound whose two halves share a letter. English produces repeats through grammar, and the doubling is usually a side effect of adding an ending to a stem that already contains that letter. When a word has five different letters, it usually means the ending did not collide with anything.

How to use this list

Four practical situations, and the list helps in all of them.

Guessing games. Use it as a filter once you have confirmed a letter is not doubled. The tool's "Has a repeated letter" mode gives you the other 4,465 so you can switch between the two halves of the dictionary and see which one the board is pointing at.

Scrabble. If your rack has no duplicates, every legal five-letter play you could make with it is on this list, and the tool's letter box will narrow it to the letters you actually hold. If the rack does have duplicates, switch to the "Has a repeated letter" mode and you will find the plays that use both copies.

Letter-grid games. A five-letter word with five different letters is worth more in a Boggle-style grid than a word with a repeated letter, because a repeated letter often means the word shares a tile with another word you already found. No-repeat words are also harder to spot, which is exactly what you want in a competitive grid.

Word searches and crosswords. A grid built from no-repeat words has a distinctive look, because the letters never fall into the double patterns that give ordinary word soup its texture. For crosswords these words are also the ones that play well with crossings, since a letter that appears once is a letter you can reuse freely elsewhere in the grid without creating a duplicate that has to be explained.

For the wider family, the complete five-letter word list has all 12,478, the double-letter list has the other 4,465, and the five-letter words without an E covers the single most useful exclusion filter in the whole dictionary.

What this list is, and what it is not

Two limits, stated plainly.

First, this is the site's own 12,478-word five-letter dictionary, and it is a word-game lexicon. It contains WAQFS, VOZHD, ZAXES and KHAZI — legal in a game, unknown to any speaker — alongside CRANE, SALAD and QUIET. It also contains ordinary inflections such as ABAMP, CHYND and GYNNY. If you want everyday five-letter words with five different letters, the everyday pool is the honest source, and the words by length page breaks the shorter lengths out separately.

Second, it is not an answer list. The published answer set is 1,994 words drawn from a much more mainstream vocabulary, and 1,375 of them have no repeated letter. A word on this page is a legal guess; whether it can be the answer is a separate question that no list can answer.