5 Letter Words Without E

6,964 of our 12,478 five-letter words contain no E

The list above is not a niche corner of English. It is the majority of it. Our five-letter dictionary holds 12,478 words, and 6,964 of them — 55.81% — are built without a single E. If a puzzle has already greyed out the letter E, more than half of every possible answer is still on the table, and the remaining search space is small enough to hold in your head.

That ratio is worth pausing on, because it cuts against a common intuition. Players treat E as a letter to be used rather than a letter to be buried, and in ordinary English prose E is indeed the most common letter there is. Across the 62,390 letters in our dictionary, E appears 6,441 times, ahead of S at 6,427, A at 5,738, O at 4,248 and R at 4,027. E shows up somewhere in 5,514 of the 12,478 words.

So the interesting fact is not that E is rare. It is that removing it barely dents the dictionary. You give up the single most common letter in the language and you still have more than half the words left. That is why ruling E out feels cheap rather than expensive, and why a good player does it earlier than most people think.

Our published answer set tells the same story from the other side. Of the 1,994 answers we have published, covering 19 June 2021 to 5 December 2026, 1,057 contain no E at all — 53.01% of the answer pool. Another way to put it: E ends 395 of those 1,994 answers (19.81%), so nearly one answer in five finishes on the letter you have just eliminated.

Why E is the letter players most want to eliminate

There are three separate reasons, and they stack. The first is frequency. E makes up 10.83% of all 9,970 letters across the published answers, the largest share of any letter. J is the rarest at 0.23%, then Q at 0.28%, X at 0.34% and Z at 0.38%. A guess that uses E is far more likely to hit something than a guess that uses Q.

The second reason is position. E ends 395 answers, Y ends 285 and T ends 225. Nothing else comes close. Because E is so often the final letter of a word, a guess with E in the fifth slot is much more informative than a guess with E in the second slot: it is likely to place a green tile if E is present at all.

The third reason is that the answer pool has been edited over the years to remove words that people found too easy or too obscure. Words ending in E are disproportionately common, plain words — think of the way the daily puzzle so often lands on something like SCALE, MOUSE or CRATE. Ruling E out takes you below that comfortable band.

But here is the honest version of the tactic, and it matters more than the flattering version. Ruling out E narrows the board; it does not solve the puzzle. You need a second vowel to fall back on, and you need to know which one. If your board currently shows no A, no I, no O and no U, then ruling out E has left you with Y as your only vowel, and the search collapses from 6,964 words to 1,317.

The order matters more than the rule. Rule out E early, when it costs you nothing, and you keep the option of using Y later. Rule it out late, after you have spent four guesses on a board where the answer was never going to contain E, and you have wasted a turn rather than gained information.

The vowel trade-off: A, I, O, U or Y

Here is the arithmetic that makes an E-free list usable rather than merely interesting. Within these 6,964 words, the vowel counts break down as follows:

Compare that with the full dictionary, where 7,415 words have exactly two vowels and 3,736 have exactly one. The shape of the E-free list is very close to the shape of the whole dictionary, which is exactly what you want: removing a vowel does not distort the remaining material, it just trims it.

The 51 words with no A, I, O or U are the genuinely strange tail of the list, and 48 of them borrow Y as a vowel: GLYPH, NYMPH, PSYCH, LYMPH, CRYPT, GYPSY, MYRRH, SYNCH, WRYLY, SKYFS, GYMPS and the rest. Only three words in the entire 12,478-word dictionary have no vowel sound whatsoever — CRWTH, CWTCH and PHPHT — and all three are E-free, because E is a vowel and this list excludes it. We have put the whole vowel-free shelf of 51 words on our page of five-letter words without any vowels if you want to see them together.

Those 51 words are a tiny slice and you will almost never play them, but they are a useful diagnostic. If your board rules out E and shows no other vowel either, look at the Y-ending entries: 951 of the 6,964 words end in Y, and the mean Scrabble value of those is 11.88, noticeably higher than the 9.46 average for the list as a whole. Y is doing more work than its letter-value suggests.

Eight words in the list are almost entirely vowel: AALII, AIDOI, AIOLI, AUDIO, AULOI, MIAOU, OIDIA and OUIJA. They are curiosities rather than guesses, but they show how wide the E-free range really is.

How to use the tool on this page

The panel at the top loads our full 12,478-word dictionary into your browser and filters it live. Nothing is sent to a server, so it works on a phone with a poor connection and it never gets slower as you play. Three controls do the work.

The letter row. Twenty-six buttons, one per letter, sit under the inputs. Each one shows how many of the words currently listed begin with that letter, so the row is a live histogram of your search space rather than a decorative alphabet. Click a letter and it joins the exclusion set: the list keeps only words containing none of the excluded letters, and the count drops accordingly. Click it again and the letter comes back. E is already excluded and is marked as permanently locked, because this page is defined by that exclusion and a list of E-free words that suddenly included E would be worse than useless.

The must-include box. Type letters there and the list narrows to words containing all of them. Type AR and you get only words carrying both an A and an R — ABHOR, ACORN, ACTOR, ADORN, ANGRY, APRON, ARBOR, AROMA, ARROW, AWARD, BARON, BOARD, BRAID, BRAIN, BRAND, BRAVO, BRAWL, BRIAR, BROAD, CHAIR, CHARM, CRAMP, CRANK, CRASH, CRAWL, CRAZY, DRAFT, DRAMA, DRAWL, FRANK, GRANT, GRAPH, GRASP, GRAVY, MARCH, PARTY, PARRY, SMART, START, TRAWL, WRATH among them. This is the control to reach for when you know a letter is in the answer but not where it sits.

The sort toggle. A–Z for reading, Z–A for the tail, and letter weight for the highest-value words first. Letter weight here means the standard English Scrabble tile value of all five letters added together: A=1, B=3, C=3, D=2, E=1, F=4, G=2, H=4, I=1, J=8, K=5, L=1, M=3, N=1, O=1, P=3, Q=10, R=1, S=1, T=1, U=1, V=4, W=4, X=8, Y=4, Z=10. It is a simple sum, not a placement calculation, but it is the same weighting the site uses everywhere else, and because E is worth only 1 point the E-free list actually scores slightly higher on average than the dictionary as a whole: 9.46 against 9.17.

The count under the sort row always reflects the list as it currently stands, not the original 6,964. The list itself is paged in stages — the first 60 words render immediately and Show more reveals the rest in blocks, so the page never tries to build seven thousand rows at once. Copy all takes the entire filtered set, not just what is on screen, and puts one word per line on your clipboard.

When an E-free list is actually the right tool

Not every puzzle needs this list, and using it at the wrong moment is a waste of a turn. These are the four situations where it earns its place.

Late-game guesses. On turns four, five and six you are not gathering information any more — you are looking for a word that fits. If E is already grey, a list of 6,964 candidates narrowed by two more grey letters and one required letter is often short enough to read end to end. CRUMB, DRAWN, FLOCK, GRIST, HUMPH, PLUMB, SHINY, SWIRL: all E-free, all plausible shapes, all worth checking against your board.

The moment you have genuinely ruled E out. A single grey E in one position does not rule E out of the word; it rules it out of that position. You need E to be grey everywhere before this list is the right list. Until then you are better off using a general solver that understands positions.

Hard mode. In hard mode every guess must reuse the revealed hints. Once E is grey, every subsequent guess has to avoid E, which means every subsequent guess has to come from this list. Loading it before you need it, and keeping it open in a second tab, is how hard-mode players stop burning turns.

Building two-word guesses. Sometimes the best move is a pair rather than a single word: one guess to test a letter, another to test a different one, neither of them intended to be the answer. Two E-free words can cover two unknown letters in one turn, and the must-include box makes it easy to build a pair that deliberately avoids the letters you have already tested.

And there is a fifth use that has nothing to do with guessing: building your own candidate list. If you are playing a themed variant, a word ladder, or a two-player race where you need a word that fits a pattern, a filterable list of this size is simply the raw material.

Read the list by shape

Scanning 6,964 words is not a plan. Scanning them by shape is. Below, C means a consonant and V means a vowel, counting A, E, I, O and U as vowels and treating Y as a consonant. The numbers are the shape counts inside the E-free list:

These shapes are a compact way to describe a board. If you know the answer has two vowels and you have found one of them, the CVVCC and CCVVC buckets are where you look; if you have found a green letter in position two and one in position four, CVCCV is your bucket. CVCVC alone holds 1,202 E-free words, and it is the single most useful shape to memorise because so many ordinary words follow it: BACON, CANON, CIVIC, DONOR, HUMOR, KAYAK, ROBIN, ROBOT and SALAD.

Read CVCCV for a different kind of information. Words in that bucket — BANJO, BINGO, FUNGI, MACHO, NINJA, PIZZA, SUSHI, TORSO and VILLA — put a vowel in the second slot and another in the fifth. That shape is common among noun-heavy everyday vocabulary, which is exactly what a daily puzzle tends to reach for.

CCVCV is small at 133 words, and small is good when you are hunting. CLOVE would fit the pattern but it has an E, so the shelf holds BRAVO, CHILI, DRAMA, FLORA, KHAKI, LLAMA, PHOTO, PLAZA, PRIMO, RHINO, SCUBA, SNAFU and SWAMI. A board with two known consonants at the start and a vowel at the end narrows to this shelf quickly.

Openings and endings inside the E-free list

Openings are the other half of the read. S opens 917 of the 6,964 words (13.17%), comfortably more than any other letter; C opens 556, B 527, P 471, T 445, A 436 and M 397. At the rare end, X opens only 7 E-free words, Q 54 and Z 61. If your board has no fixed opening and you are looking for a starting guess, the most efficient E-free openers are the ones that also carry a vowel — CRANE is out because of the E, but CLASP, BRING, CLING, FLOUR, GRAFT and STOMP all do the job.

Endings concentrate far more sharply than openings. S closes 2,422 of these words — 34.78% of the entire list. Y closes 951 (13.66%), A closes 501, T closes 452, N closes 324, O closes 296, L closes 284 and H closes 274. At the far end, only 2 E-free words end in J, 2 end in V, 3 end in Q and 26 end in Z.

That concentration is the single most useful fact for late-game guessing. If you have ruled out E and you know the last letter is a consonant, the odds are heavily in favour of S, Y or T — and if the last letter is a vowel, then A, O or I, because U is thin at 56 words. A board with a known grey E and a known green A somewhere in the middle is usually a Y-word or an S-word, and you can check those two shelves in a minute.

Where J, Q, X and Z actually appear

Rare letters are cheap information, which is why they matter here even though they are rare. Inside the E-free list, Z appears in 195 words, J in 165, X in 81 and Q in 71. These four letters are worth about 512 words between them — under 8% of the list — and they are spread out rather than clustered, so a single guess that includes one of them tells you a lot for very little.

The position data is worth memorising. X opens just 7 E-free words and closes 28. J opens 109 and closes only 2. Q opens 54 and closes 3. Z opens 61 and closes 26. So a J at the end of the word is almost impossible, while a J at the start is very common: JAZZY, JUMBO, JOLLY, JOUST, JOIST, JUMPY, JAUNT and JIFFY are all in the published answer set.

The answer pool agrees. Across 1,994 published answers, X has never once started an answer — it is the only letter with that record — and J, Q and V have never ended one. X accounts for 0.34% of all answer letters, Z for 0.38%, Q for 0.28% and J for 0.23%. If you have a green X or Z sitting in the middle of a board, the answer is probably around it. If X is grey, nothing is lost; it was never likely to be there anyway.

There is a nice symmetry here worth using: the letters that are rare in English are exactly the letters that survive an E exclusion untouched. E is common, so removing it costs you nothing in coverage of J, Q, X or Z. If your board has eliminated E and you still need to place a high-value tile, this list keeps every option open.

Worked examples: real E-free words and what each one tells you

Here are twelve words from the list, spelled out as patterns, with their letter weight shown. All twelve are legal guesses, and ten of them have actually been published answers at some point.

Notice what those examples do and do not prove. ABACK and KAYAK are the interesting ones from a guessing perspective, because each repeats a letter, which lets a single guess light up two tiles at the same time. Of the 6,964 E-free words, 1,107 contain a consecutive double — AALII, ABBOT, ABUZZ, ACCOY, ADDIO — and 2,687 repeat some letter without the copies sitting side by side. Our full list of all 4,465 doubled words covers the rest of the dictionary. Only 4,277 are true isograms, all five letters different. A guess with a double in it is worth slightly more than a guess without, because it can convert one grey into a green and a second grey at the same time.

Here is a shorter set of E-free words that have all appeared as published answers, so you can see how the list behaves when the words are real ones rather than dictionary fillers. They are the words worth trying first when your board is open.

• ABOUT7
• ACORN7
• ACTOR7
• ADOPT8
• ALIGN6
• ALLOW8
• APPLY12
• ARROW8
• ATLAS5
• AUDIT6
• AVOID9
• AWARD9
• AWFUL11
• BACON9
• BANJO14
• BLOCK13
• BLOOM9
• CANDY11
• CARRY10
• CHAIR10
• CHARM12
• CLIMB11
• CLOUD8
• CRAFT10
• CRASH10
• CROAK11
• CROWD11
• CROWN10
• CRUSH10
• CRYPT12
• CURRY10
• DIARY9
• DIZZY27
• DRAFT9
• DRINK10
• DRUNK10
• FLASH11
• FLOOD9
• FOCUS10
• FUNNY11
• GLYPH14
• GRAND7
• GUILD7
• GUMMY13
• HATCH13
• HOARD9
• HUMPH15
• HURRY11
• IGLOO6
• INPUT7
• IRONY8
• JAZZY33
• JOLLY15
• JUMBO16

E-free against S-free: 6,964 versus 6,759

The natural comparison is with the no-S list, because S is the most common letter to grey out after E. By our counts, 6,759 five-letter words contain no S — 205 fewer than the E-free list. Both lists are roughly the same size, so the choice between them is about what you have learned, not about which filter is bigger.

S and E are different kinds of problem. S is the most common letter to begin a word in this dictionary: 1,521 of the 12,478 words start with S, far ahead of C at 888, B at 871, P at 821 and T at 787. It is also the most common letter to end a word, and in the E-free list alone 2,422 words end in S. S starts 300 of the 1,994 published answers (15.05%), while Z starts only 2. So S is both a common opener and a common closer, and greying it removes plural forms and S-initial words all at once.

E, by contrast, is the most common letter overall — 6,441 occurrences, ahead of S at 6,427 — but it is not the most common opener, because words rarely begin with E in English. That is why ruling out E feels safer than ruling out S: you are removing a letter from the middle and end of the word without touching the opening position.

The overlap is worth knowing. 3,491 words contain neither E nor S, so if you have greyed out both letters you are working with a little over a third of the dictionary rather than half. Those two exclusions together remove more than seven thousand candidates, which is a very large amount of information for zero guesses spent — provided you actually know they are grey.

There is a similar comparison waiting with Y. Greying out E, S and Y is aggressive, but it is defensible in the late game, and the tool's letter row will tell you instantly whether it has left you with too little to work with.

Why E-free tiles are worth having in Scrabble

Scrabble rewards the same property that makes this list interesting: E is worth a single point, and there are six of them in a set. An E-free rack is a rack of tiles that can all do more work. Instead of spending a third of your letters on one-point fillers, you have six tiles free to place on premium squares, extend words on the board, or form parallel plays across existing words.

The numbers back this up. The mean letter weight across the 6,964 E-free words is 9.46, against 9.17 for the full 12,478-word dictionary. The E-free list is the richer list, and it is richer precisely because the letters it discards are the cheap ones. It also keeps every premium tile in play: 2,941 of the E-free words score 10 points or more and 447 score 15 or more.

At the top of the range, PZAZZ takes 34 points (P3 + Z10 + A1 + Z10 + Z10), JAZZY 33, and FIZZY, FUZZY, HUZZY and WHIZZ all sit at 29. FEZZY would also reach 29 but it contains an E, so this list does not have it — a small illustration of what the filter costs you in exchange for the guarantee that no letter is wasted.

In practice, the value of an E-free rack is less about the top scorer and more about the boring middle. Words like ABACA, ACCOY, ACHOO, ALKYD, BALMY, CHYND, DROSS, FLUMP, GRYPT and KYDST will never win a game, but they are openers and hooks that let you keep a premium square alive. Working through the list with the letter-weight sort is a good way to find the words that are playable but not obvious — and our Scrabble solver will score a specific rack and board for you if you want the placement maths done properly.

What this list is not

The most important limitation is the one that catches people out: this is our dictionary, not the official answer pool. It is a list of legal guesses. Out of the 6,964 words here, 1,037 have actually been published answers — 14.89% — and the other 5,927, or 85.11%, are perfectly valid guesses that have never been and may never be the answer. A filtered dictionary narrows your options; it does not rank them by likelihood.

Two further caveats. First, the answer pool itself is edited over time by the publisher, so a word that was legal yesterday may not be today. Our answer archive is a record of what actually happened rather than a promise about the future, and the same caution applies to any guess list. Second, none of this tells you which word is being used today. If you want today's answer, the daily hint page is the place to look; if you want to know how the answer pool behaves over time, the statistics page breaks down letter frequency, endings and openings across all 1,994 published answers.

Finally, a word being in our dictionary does not mean it will be accepted by every game that uses a five-letter word list. Dictionaries differ between apps, between casual and tournament Scrabble, and between word-game clones. Use this list as a strong working set, not as a guarantee.

Where to go next

If you need a broader sweep, the full five-letter list covers all 12,478 words, and the generator lets you build a filtered subset by position, by required letters and by excluded letters at once. If you already know your opening letters, the site publishes a starting-letter page for every letter of the alphabet and for common two-letter combinations — our A words is one of them, and S words is the other that matters for this topic, since S opens more words than any other letter.

For a different angle entirely, the word finder searches across all the word lengths and lengths of lists on the site. If a scrambled set of tiles is what you actually have, unscramble letters is the faster route, and the Scrabble solver handles racks and boards.

And if you are playing the daily puzzle rather than studying lists, today's hints and the answer archive will tell you what has actually been played, while the answer statistics show you how the pool is built. If you remember a puzzle number rather than a date, the answer-by-number lookup goes straight to it.