5 Letter Words Without Vowels — Only 51

Across a dictionary of 12,478 five-letter words, just 51 contain no A, E, I, O or U. That is 0.41% of the language. Here is every one of them, with a switch that decides whether Y counts as a vowel — flip it on and the list collapses to three words.

Count Y as a vowel Must include these letters Sort A–Z Z–A Copy all

51 words of 51 vowel-free five-letter words — no A, E, I, O or U

Y is treated as a consonant here, so the 51 words that contain no A, E, I, O or U are all listed.

Every one of the 51 is on screen — nothing is hidden behind a “show more” button. Many of them are Scrabble-valid but obscure: HWYLS, SKYFS, BYRLS and TYPPS are Scrabble-only inflections rather than everyday English. This list is the site’s own five-letter dictionary filtered by vowel, not a hand-picked shortlist of “real” words, and the 51 shown here are exactly the 51 that exist in it.

Why only 51 of 12,478 five-letter words have no vowels

The headline number is the surprise. Our five-letter dictionary holds 12,478 words. Strip out every word that uses an A, E, I, O or U and 51 survive. That is 0.41% of the collection, a little over four words in every thousand.

Start with the letters themselves. Across all 62,390 letters in the dictionary, A, E, I, O and U account for 22,421 — 35.94% of everything the language spells. E alone appears 6,441 times, 10.32% of all letters, and A appears 5,738 times, 9.20%. O contributes 6.81%, I 5.76% and U 3.85%. Vowels are not decoration in English. They are roughly a third of the ink.

Now think about how quickly that shrinks a list. Remove a single E and you still have 6,964 words, 55.81% of the dictionary. Remove A as well and the pool falls to 3,542. Keep going and you arrive at the 51. Each vowel you delete is not a small trim; it is a large one.

There is a way to make the scale of the collapse concrete. If vowel presence in a five-letter word were an independent coin flip, deleting five vowels at once would leave roughly 1,350 words, because you would be multiplying out a 0.64 chance five times. The real answer is 51 — about 26 times smaller than independence predicts. English is not missing vowels at random. It is actively refusing to produce words without them, and it does that at the level of the syllable, not the letter.

That refusal is structural. English words are built on a nucleus, and the nucleus is almost always a vowel. A typical five-letter word carries two or three vowels simply because most five-letter words carry two or three syllables, and every syllable wants a vowel to hang its shape on. Remove the vowel and you have removed the skeleton, not just a decoration. What is left is a consonant skeleton that English has no habit of pronouncing.

There is a second reason the number is small, and it is subtler. The 51 are not 51 random consonant piles. They cluster around two letters: 48 of the 51 contain a Y, and 30 of the 51 contain an S. In the Y group, the Y is doing the job of the missing vowel. Strip Y out as well and the entire set falls to three words. So the honest summary of this page is not “51 vowel-free words”. It is “51 words that manage without A, E, I, O or U, 48 of them by letting Y carry the syllable”.

The complete list of 51 vowel-free five-letter words

Here is the set in full, grouped by first letter. S is the biggest group with 11 words and G follows with 7, while C and T have 5 each. Read the endings as you go: the list has a very narrow set of possible shapes, and that narrowness is the story of the whole collection.

Ten of the 26 letters never start a word in this list: A, E, I, J, O, Q, U, V, Y and Z all score zero. The chips above the tool show that as a row of empty counters, which is a useful reminder of how narrow this corner of the language is.

The endings are just as narrow. Twenty of the 51 end in S, 12 end in Y, 11 end in H, 5 end in T, 2 end in L and exactly one ends in D (DRYLY). Nothing ends in A, B, C, E, I, N, O, U, V, W, X or Z. If you had to guess a vowel-free five-letter word by shape alone, you would guess an S-ending or a Y-ending, and you would be right about half the time.

What your brain does when it reads a vowel-free word

English obligates you to pronounce a syllable in almost every word, and when a word appears to have no vowel, your brain supplies one whether the spelling offers it or not. This is the schwa effect, and it explains why these words feel strange even when you know them.

Look at what happens with the Greek-derived words in the list. GLYPH is pronounced “glif”. NYMPH is “nimp”. MYRRH, the resin from the myrrh tree, is “mur”. SYLPH is “sylf”. SYNCH is “sink”. LYMPH is “limf”. None of those pronunciations contains a vowel letter, and none of them contains a spoken vowel either. What happened is that the Y was recruited as the nucleus, and the surrounding consonants were mashed together around it in a way that makes the word sound clipped, archaic and faintly comic. The brain is not mispronouncing these words. The brain is following English’s rule that a syllable needs a centre, and then judging the result odd because the spelling promised a clean vowel it never got.

The clearest proof that Y and I are the same letter in disguise is PSYCH. It is spelled P-S-Y-C-H and spoken with a long “i” sound, “sike”, exactly as if it were spelled PSYCH with an I. The Y is doing the vowel job in a word where the reader would never think of calling it a vowel-free word. The same trick gives CRYPT its “kript” and TRYST its “trist”.

Then there is the suffix effect, and it cuts the other way. DRYLY, SHYLY, SLYLY and WRYLY are spelled without a single A, E, I, O or U, but nobody pronounces them “dril-ee” without an “ee”. The -LY ending is a vowel syllable in speech, which makes these four words a nice illustration of the difference between spelling and sound. By the letter count they are vowel-free. By the sound count they are not. This page is counting letters, and it says so, because letter counts are what the games use.

Twelve of the 51 end in Y, and in those the Y is plainly the vowel: GYPSY, PYGMY, GYNNY, GYPPY, STYMY, THYMY, MYTHY, DRYLY, SHYLY, SLYLY, WRYLY and FLYBY. Of the 48 that contain a Y, 30 carry it in the second position — BYRLS, CYSTS, FYRDS, GYMPS, GYNNY, GYPPY, GYPSY, HYMNS, KYDST, KYNDS, LYMPH, LYNCH, MYRRH, MYTHS, MYTHY, NYMPH, PYGMY, RYNDS, SYLPH, SYNCH, SYNCS, SYNDS, SYNTH, SYPHS, TYMPS, TYPPS, WYNDS, WYNNS, XYLYL and XYSTS — where it is almost always carrying the syllable. The other 18 sit it in the third position: CHYND, CRYPT, DRYLY, FLYBY, GHYLL, GLYPH, GRYPT, HWYLS, PSYCH, SHYLY, SKYFS, SKYRS, SLYLY, STYMY, THYMY, TRYPS, TRYST and WRYLY. So the dominant pattern in this list is a bare consonant, a Y-vowel, and then a consonant tail, with an S, an H or a Y most likely to close it.

Here is the other side of the same coin. A word has to be pronounceable to be a word, and that is precisely why these 51 are mostly obscure. They entered the lexicon because English borrowed them, and they stayed in the game dictionaries because Scrabble scores spelling rather than speech. A dialect speaker could say a word perfectly well; a crossword setter could write it down; but a person guessing from scratch will never volunteer CRWTH or PHPHT.

Is Y a vowel? Two conventions, and which one the tool uses

This is the part of the topic where careful people disagree, and it is worth being precise because the number in the title depends on it.

There are two conventions in play, and they come from different places.

The first is the lexicographic and Scrabble convention. In the standard word lists used for competitive play, Y is a consonant by default, but a Y that carries the syllable is treated as a vowel. That is why RHYTHM, NYMPH, CRYPT and PHYLACTERY are all perfectly good Scrabble words: the Y is doing the vowel work and the word is still accepted. Under this convention, a word can have no A, E, I, O or U and still be a normal word with exactly one vowel, spelled with Y. Read that way, the list on this page is not a list of vowel-less words. It is a list of words whose vowel is a Y.

The second is the daily-puzzle convention. In five-letter guessing games, a word with no A, E, I, O or U but with a Y is usually described as having one vowel, because the Y fills the slot. The daily five-letter game itself uses a Y-word for its “one vowel” clue, and most player communities count Y as a vowel for exactly that purpose. Under this convention, the interesting number is not 51 but 3 — the words that have no vowel even by that generous reading.

The toggle at the top of this page makes the choice explicit rather than leaving you to guess. With it off — the default — the tool uses the strict letter rule: A, E, I, O and U are vowels, Y is a consonant, and you get 51 words. With it on, the tool uses the puzzle convention: Y counts as a vowel too, and the list drops to the three words CRWTH, CWTCH and PHPHT. The count, the list and the letter chips all follow the switch, so you can move between the two readings and see exactly how much of the list is riding on a single letter.

Worth being honest about the limits of the heuristic: “Y in the middle of a word is usually the vowel” is a rule of thumb, not a law. GYPSY has a vowel-Y in the second position and a consonant-Y at the end. MYTHY, THYMY and XYLYL carry a second Y at the end. SKYFS, SKYRS, BYRLS and HWYLS are Scrabble inflections in which the Y is not carrying a syllable at all. There is no orthographic test that sorts this out perfectly, which is why a list like this one is more honest as a dictionary lookup than as a rule.

The three words with no vowel at all

Turn the toggle on and the entire collection reduces to CRWTH, CWTCH and PHPHT. Three words out of 12,478. They are worth looking at individually, because they are genuinely interesting rather than merely odd.

CRWTH is Welsh, commonly glossed as a low hum or a crowing noise, and it comes into English through the medium of the crossword and game lexicons rather than through ordinary use. CWTCH is Cornish — the word for a couch or settee, and a word that crossed into south-western English speech before the game dictionaries took it up. PHPHT is Scots, in the same family as the “what’s that” style of word that English borrowed so heavily in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and it is spelled with a PH because that is how the sound is written in Scots. All three are English-lexicon Scrabble forms: they appear in the word lists used for competitive play, which is a list built by lexicographers from printed English usage, including regional and historical usage that everyday English left behind.

None of them will ever be a published answer in a daily five-letter game. Not because the games forbid them, but because the answer pools are drawn from a much more mainstream set of words, and neither CRWTH, CWTCH nor PHPHT has ever been in one. If you want to see where the boundary sits, compare this trio with the eight published answers that have no A, E, I, O or U: CRYPT, DRYLY, GLYPH, MYRRH, NYMPH, PSYCH, SHYLY and TRYST. Every one of those eight is a Y-word that a mainstream reader would recognise. Not one of them is dialect-garbage. The gap between those two groups is the whole story of how mainstream a word list is.

These three are also a good sanity check on any vowel-free list you meet elsewhere. If a tool claims a hundred or two hundred five-letter words with no A, E, I, O, U or Y, it is counting something different from what this page counts — usually it is including words with a Y, or it is using a much larger inflected dictionary.

How this compares with the published daily-game answers

The published answer list is a much narrower thing than the full dictionary, and it is worth measuring this list against it directly. The published set of answers runs to 1,994 words, covering 1,962 distinct ones, with 32 words reused across the run.

Exactly eight of those 1,994 answers contain no A, E, I, O or U: CRYPT, DRYLY, GLYPH, MYRRH, NYMPH, PSYCH, SHYLY and TRYST. That is 0.40%, which matches the 0.41% we see across the whole dictionary almost exactly. The answer pool and the dictionary agree: vowel-free words are vanishingly rare in English whether you are counting guesses or answers.

Not one published answer lacks A, E, I, O, U and Y together. So in the entire published history of the game, no answer has ever needed a consonant to carry the whole word on its own. The Y is doing the work in all eight, without exception.

For contrast, 1,158 answers — 58.07% of the total — have exactly two vowels, and only eight have none at all. Across the wider five-letter dictionary the same shape holds: 3,736 words have exactly one vowel and 7,415 have exactly two. Two vowels is the English default, and a vowel-free word is a genuine rarity rather than an eccentric edge case that only shows up in puzzle books.

The rest of the answer-set statistics point the same way. E is 10.83% of all the letters across the published answers, more than any other letter, and it ends 395 answers — 19.81% of them, the single most common ending in the game. S starts 300 answers. X has never once started an answer, and J, Q and V have never ended one. The vowels are not just inside these words; they are holding the edges of them.

Are vowel-free words ever useful in a five-letter daily game?

As a guess, almost never. The base rate is 8 in 1,994, so a vowel-free guess is wrong more than 99.5% of the time. Spending a precious guess on CRYPT to “find” a Y is a bad trade, and any guide that tells you to hunt for Y with a vowel-free word is giving you bad advice.

They are useful in three other ways, and the distinction matters.

First, knowing the answer pool. This is the real payoff. If you have played through enough guesses that every one of the five vowels has come back gray, you do not need a list of possibilities — you need a list of eight. Because every published answer with no A, E, I, O or U is one of CRYPT, DRYLY, GLYPH, MYRRH, NYMPH, PSYCH, SHYLY and TRYST, and all eight of those also happen to be on the 51-word list above, you can use this page as a lookup table for the endgame.

It is worth walking through how sharp that endgame is, because it is the one place where this list genuinely pays for itself. Take the eight candidates and guess LYMPH — a word on the list, so a legal guess, and one whose feedback is different for every one of the eight. Against NYMPH it returns four greens. Against TRYST it returns a single yellow. Against GLYPH, two yellows and two greens. Against SHYLY, three yellows. Against CRYPT, a yellow and a green. Against MYRRH, a green, a yellow and a green. Against DRYLY, two yellows. Against PSYCH, two yellows and a green. Eight different feedback patterns from one guess, and eight candidates, so one guess identifies the answer outright. That is not a trick or a lucky guess; it falls straight out of the eight words, and you can check the arithmetic yourself on this page.

Second, final-letter elimination. The wider the hole you have dug, the smaller the pool gets, and vowels are the biggest holes you can dig. In the published answer set, 651 of the 1,994 answers have neither an E nor an O, which is a third of the pool removed by two grays. In the full five-letter dictionary the equivalent figure is 4,384 of 12,478. If a game told you the answer has no E and no O, you would be working with a third of the possibilities, and a list like this one is how you would finish the job.

Third, unblocking a board where the vowels are gone. If your rack of remaining letters contains no vowel at all, ordinary five-letter words are off the table. That is the situation this page exists for, and the words on it are the only way to place a consonant-only rack in a five-letter frame.

Using the list to narrow an endgame

Here is a practical ladder for using a vowel-free list while a puzzle is running.

Start by counting your grays. One gray vowel removes a lot, but not enough to matter on its own: no E leaves 6,964 dictionary words, 55.81% of the collection. Two greys hurt much more. No E and no O leaves 4,384 words in the dictionary and 651 of the published answers. Three greys, say no A, no E and no O, and the dictionary pool is down to 1,724 words. Four greys, adding no I, leaves 689. Five greys, all of A, E, I, O and U gone, leaves the 51 on this page, of which only eight have ever been a published answer.

That ladder is worth memorising in shape rather than in numbers, because the shape is the durable part: vowels are eliminated roughly in order of how common they are, and each step is a multiplication rather than a subtraction. The moment you have four vowels ruled out, you are no longer playing a guessing game. You are choosing between a few dozen specific words, and the list is the whole decision space.

Then work on the shape. The 51 words start with only sixteen different letters and end with only six, so if you have a strong feeling about the answer starting with S, you are choosing from 11 words, and if you know it ends in H you are choosing from 11 as well. Combining the two narrows to three — SYLPH, SYNCH and SYNTH — all of which are a Y and an S away from each other. This is the same technique used on the site’s full five-letter index, but here it runs on a set small enough to hold in your head.

One caveat about all of this: the published answer list is not the same as the guess pool. The daily game accepts far more words as guesses than it ever uses as answers, and the 12,478-word dictionary behind this page is a guess-and-answer pool, not the answer list. A word being on this list tells you it is a legal word in the game’s dictionary. It does not tell you it can be the answer. Only eight of them ever have been.

Vowel-free words at four letters and below

The five-letter case is the hard one, and the shorter words explain why. The site’s wider dictionary has 267,751 entries. Broken down by length, the vowel-free share falls off a cliff as words get longer:

Length	Words in dictionary	With no A, E, I, O, U	Share
2 letters	124	10	8.06%
3 letters	1,292	41	3.17%
4 letters	5,454	47	0.86%
5 letters	12,478	51	0.41%
6 letters	22,157	22	0.10%
7 letters	32,909	4	0.01%
8 letters and over	193,337	0	0.00%

The reason is syllable count. A three-letter word needs one nucleus and can find it in a Y without anyone noticing: CRY, DRY, FRY, FLY, WHY, WRY, SHY, SPY, SKY, TRY, PRY, THY, SYN, CLY, PLY, SLY and their kin. Nobody calls CRY a vowel-free word, because the Y is transparently a vowel and the word is doing exactly what a three-letter word should do. A five-letter word usually needs two, and if you remove the vowels you are left with a word that has to say two syllables with no second nucleus, which is why the list fills up with clipped, consonant-heavy forms like SYNCH and LYMPH.

At four letters the list is 47 words, and it contains some of the best material in the whole topic: CYST, HYMN, LYNX, MYTH, SYNC, SYND, SYPH, WYND, WHYS, SCRY, SKRY, SPRY, TRYP, PSST, and the magnificent JYNX. A word like HYMN or MYTH is an ordinary English word with a Y in the middle doing a vowel’s job, and a word like JYNX is four consonant tiles and a Y that earns its place by carrying the syllable.

The two-letter vowel-free words are only ten: BY, CH, FY, HM, KY, MM, MY, NY, SH and ST. They are mostly fragments and onomatopoeia rather than words, which is a fair summary of how thin the whole phenomenon becomes once you strip the vowel out.

And at six letters and above

Past five letters the list gets shorter still, and more interesting. There are 22 six-letter vowel-free words, and most of them are simply plurals of the five-letter set: CRYPTS, GLYPHS, NYMPHS, PSYCHS, SYLPHS, SYNCHS, SYNTHS, TRYSTS, MYRRHS, FLYBYS, GHYLLS, GLYCYL, SYLPHY, SPRYLY, XYLYLS, CRWTHS, LYMPHS and FLYSCH.

Three more earn their place for a different reason. RHYTHM is the classic Y-vowel word, and so is SPHYNX. SYZYGY is a crossword favourite precisely because it manages with a single Y in an eight-syllable-feeling shape. TSKTSK is onomatopoeia, and so are TSKTSKS, which is as close as English gets to a seven-letter word with no vowel at all.

At seven letters there are exactly four: GLYCYLS, NYMPHLY, RHYTHMS and TSKTSKS. At eight letters there are none. The longest vowel-free word anywhere in the site’s 267,751-word dictionary is seven letters long, and there are only four of them. This is the cleanest possible statement of the rule the whole page is about: as a word gets longer, its chance of surviving without a vowel collapses to nothing, because every extra letter is another syllable that needs its own centre.

How a vowel-free rack unjams a Scrabble board

The Scrabble case is the one that gets quoted most often, so it is worth being precise about it rather than enthusiastic.

The strategic idea is sound. If you are holding a rack of consonants and you have no vowel to place, you cannot play an ordinary word, and your turn is dead. A consonant-only play solves the immediate problem: it uses up dead tiles, opens a board, and often sets up a scoring play on your next turn. On a board where you need to break a premium square, a two- or three-letter consonant play can be the cheapest way in.

But the five-letter vowel-free list cannot rescue your high letters, and it is worth saying so plainly. None of the 51 contains a Q, a J, a Z or a V. Only two contain an X, and they are XYLYL and XYSTS. If you are stuck holding a Q, this list is no help at all.

Where the real power lies is in the shorter and longer forms. JYNX is the standout: four tiles, 21 points including the J and the X, and it needs no vowel tile because the Y carries the syllable. TSKTSK scores 14 and consumes a stack of awkward letters. PYX scores 15 across three tiles. ZZZS is 31 points for four tiles of almost pure obscurity. And then there are the quieter ones that win games in practice: CRY, DRY, FRY, TRY, WHY, WRY, SHY, SPY, SKY, MYC, TSK, and the two-letter fragments like MY, NY and SH that hook onto existing boards for a small but real score.

And then there is the Y trick at its most useful. NYMPH, CRYPT, GLYPH and SYNCH let you unload a Y-heavy rack alongside a premium square without needing an A, E, I, O or U anywhere in the play. If your rack is full of consonants and a stray Y, one of these is often the difference between a turn and a pass. Which is why, when a Scrabble game turns into a vowel drought, players reach for exactly this corner of the lexicon — and why a good two-letter word reference and a full solver are worth having open at the same time.

Where this list is directly useful

Three games use vowel-free five-letter words more directly than Wordle does.

Spelling-bee style pangram hunts are the first. A hive whose only vowel is Y is unusual, but it happens, and when it does, every word that carries the syllable has to be a Y-word. The five-letter Y-words on this page — CRYPT, GLYPH, NYMPH, PSYCH, SYNCH, LYMPH and the rest — are exactly the shape that fills those slots, and in a pangram hunt they are the words that make the rare letter worth something. The broader lesson is the same: the game’s answer list is a curated lexicon, and a general dictionary will over-promise, so treat any list as a candidate pool and let the puzzle decide.

Word-search construction is the second, and it works for a practical reason rather than a romantic one. The 51 are extremely Y-heavy and S-heavy: 48 of them contain a Y and 30 contain an S, with H and T next. A grid built from this list has a distinctive visual signature, which makes it excellent for a themed puzzle or a grid you want to feel different from the everyday-word soup. It also supplies an unusual stock of long, non-obvious strings — CHYND, THYMY, KYDST, GYNNY — to fill space so that the ordinary words you actually want hidden stand out.

The third is any house-rule variant with a vowel constraint. “Consonant-only Wordle”, “no A, E, I, O or U”, or a two-player duel where the board is restricted to vowel-free words are all real formats, and all of them need exactly this: a verified list, with the Y question settled one way and stated plainly.

There is also a crossword use worth mentioning. Five-letter words with no A, E, I, O or U are rare enough that a setter reaching for one gets a long entry with no of the most common crossing letters, which in practice means very few down answers become impossible. It is a way of adding a long, unusual word to a grid without wrecking the crossings around it.

The limits of this list

Every list is only as good as the dictionary behind it, so here is exactly what this one is.

It is built from the site’s own five-letter word list of 12,478 entries, and that list is Scrabble-flavoured. It includes dialect borrowings and historical forms, and it includes inflections that exist only for the purposes of the game: HWYLS, SKYFS, SKYRS, BYRLS, FYRDS, KYDST, RYNDS, SYNDS, TYPPS and XYSTS are all in the 51, and none of them is a word you would meet in a book. If you want everyday five-letter words organised properly, the full index is a better place to start; if you want the vowel-free corner specifically, this is the accurate version of it.

It is not the official answer list for any daily five-letter game. That list is 1,994 published answers covering 1,962 distinct words, and it is drawn from a much more mainstream set. Words on this list can be legal guesses; only eight of them have ever been answers. It is also not identical to the tournament Scrabble lexicon, though the two overlap heavily.

Finally, remember what is being counted. This page counts letters in the spelling. Whether a word “has a vowel” in speech is a different question, and for words like DRYLY, SHYLY, GLYPH and MYRRH the two answers differ. The count of 51 is the count of spellings without an A, E, I, O or U. The count of 3 is the count of spellings without an A, E, I, O, U or Y. Both are true, and the switch at the top of the page moves between them so you never have to guess which one a page is using.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many five-letter words have no vowels?

51 five-letter words contain no A, E, I, O or U out of the 12,478 words in our five-letter dictionary, which is 0.41% of the list. If you also treat Y as a vowel, only 3 words survive: CRWTH, CWTCH and PHPHT.

Is Y a vowel in these words?

It depends on the convention, and the page shows both. Under the strict letter rule used in Scrabble, Y is a consonant unless it carries the syllable, so a word like CRYPT has no A, E, I, O or U. Under the daily-puzzle convention, a Y that fills the vowel slot counts as a vowel, which leaves only CRWTH, CWTCH and PHPHT. The toggle on the tool switches between the two readings and updates the list and the count live.

What are the three five-letter words with no vowel at all?

CRWTH, CWTCH and PHPHT. All three are English-lexicon Scrabble forms borrowed from Celtic languages: CRWTH is Welsh for a low hum, CWTCH is Cornish for a couch or settee, and PHPHT is a Scots word for a thing or whatever. They are accepted in the competitive Scrabble lexicon and in many word-game dictionaries, and they will never be an answer in a published daily five-letter game.

How many published daily-game answers have no A, E, I, O or U?

Eight of the 1,994 published answers: CRYPT, DRYLY, GLYPH, MYRRH, NYMPH, PSYCH, SHYLY and TRYST. That is 0.40%, almost exactly the same share as the 0.41% we see across the full dictionary. No published answer has ever lacked A, E, I, O, U and Y together.

Are vowel-free words useful as guesses in a five-letter game?

Very rarely as a guess, because the base rate is 8 in 1,994. They are genuinely useful in three other ways: knowing the answer pool once all five vowels have come back gray, eliminating final letters when you have ruled out two or more vowels, and playing a board where the remaining letters contain no vowel at all.

Are there vowel-free words with fewer than five letters?

Yes. Our wider dictionary contains 10 vowel-free two-letter words, 41 three-letter words and 47 four-letter words. Good examples include CYST, HYMN, LYNX, MYTH, SYNC, WYND, and the Scrabble favourite JYNX. The share of vowel-free words falls as length rises, and at eight letters and over there are none at all.

Can I use this list in Scrabble?

Yes, with a caveat. The five-letter vowel-free words here are mostly low-scoring consonant strings, and none of them contains a Q, J, Z or V. The high-value vowel-free plays are shorter and longer: JYNX, TSKTSK, PYX and ZZZS. Our Scrabble solver and two-letter word list cover the rest of the board.

Related tools and lists

If you are working through a five-letter puzzle, these are the pages that pair well with this one.