6 Letter Words — All 22,157 of Them

Why 22,157 six-letter words is a different kind of problem

The count itself is worth pausing on. This site's dictionary holds 12,478 five-letter words, 22,157 six-letter words and 32,909 seven-letter words. The step from five to six adds 9,679 entries — 77.5% more words than the entire five-letter list. From six to seven it adds 10,752 more. If you have worked with the five-letter list, six letters is not a slightly bigger version of the same problem. It is a different shape of problem.

The reason is inflection. Six letters is the first length at which adding a single letter to a five-letter word produces a valid word in bulk. 6,360 words in this list — 28.70% of the whole collection — end in S. Another 2,068 end in ED, 1,660 in ES, 1,638 in ER and 517 in ING. Add those five endings together and 10,583 words, 47.76% of the list, are derived forms rather than independent vocabulary.

Put more precisely: 5,567 words (25.13% of the entire list) are exactly a five-letter word from this site's own dictionary with an S attached. Another 692 are a five-letter word plus ED, and 411 are a five-letter word plus ER. Altogether 6,911 words, 31.19% of the collection, can be produced by taking a shorter word and adding a standard inflection.

That is not a flaw in the dictionary. It is what a dictionary is. English is a heavily inflected language, and the number six happens to be where inflection starts to outvote independent vocabulary. Anyone who has played a word game at six letters has felt this: the answer is nearly always something you recognise once you remove the ending, and almost never something you would have guessed from scratch.

How to tell a likely answer from an obscure form

This is the practical question at six letters, and it has a workable answer. The screen below is built from counts in this dictionary, so every threshold is measurable rather than a matter of taste.

Step 1: work from the ending

Before you read a word from the left, read it from the right. If it ends in S, ED, ES, ER or ING, you are very probably looking at a derived form, and the first five letters are the actual word. ABASES is ABASE. ABATED is ABATE. ANGLER is ANGLE. ANTICS is ANTIC. AISLED is AISLE. These are not separate entries in the mind of a player; they are one entry with a grammatical hat on.

The test is simple and it is fast: drop the ending and ask whether what remains is a word you recognise. If it is, you have found the root. If nothing recognisable is left, keep reading — you are probably looking at a form that exists for the games rather than for conversation.

Step 2: look for the awkward consonant cluster

1,059 words — 4.78% of the list — end in a consonant, a consonant and then an S. That pattern is the signature of a Scrabble-only inflection: ALKYDS, ALKYLS, ABOHMS, AHOLDS, AIRTHS, ABANDS, ALANDS, ALANTS, ABSEYS, ANGSTS. Nothing in ordinary English pluralises a stem by dumping a silent letter and then an S.

This is a reliable screen because it is arithmetic rather than opinion. Ordinary six-letter words cluster on clean endings; game-only forms cluster on crowded ones. If you spot the pattern, you have found a word that will appear in a tournament lexicon and will never appear in a crossword.

Step 3: check whether it is built from two words

724 words (3.27%) begin with a word that is being used as a particle: DAYBED, DAYBOY, DAYFLY, DAYGLO, DAYLIT, BIRDIE, BOOKIE, BOOKSY, FOOTIE, FOOTLE, FOOTSY, GOLDEN, HANDED, HANDLE, HOUSEY, IRONIC, MANAGE, MANGAS, MANGER. Compounds are still real words, but they behave differently in a puzzle. They usually offer no new letter, they are hard to guess, and they are the first thing a setter reaches for when a grid needs filling without crossing anything.

Step 4: watch for the Latinate endings

Here is the useful inversion. If a word ends in one of the productive Latinate suffixes, it is almost certainly genuine vocabulary, because those suffixes exist to make real words. This list contains 12 words ending in TION (ACTION, LOTION, MOTION, NATION, NOTION, OPTION, POTION, RATION and four rarer forms), 7 ending in MENT, 44 in FUL, 9 in WARD, 2 in LESS and exactly 1 in HOOD.

Compare that with the zero counts at the far end of the scale: not one six-letter word in this dictionary ends in NESS. When a suffix produces a small or empty class at this length, a word carrying it is worth paying attention to. When it produces a large class — like the 6,360 S-endings — the suffix is telling you nothing.

Step 5: apply the say-it test

The last screen is the oldest one in the trade: if you would not say it out loud to another person, it is a game form rather than a word. ABYSMAL and DROWSY are dictionary words that happen to be unusual. ALKYDS and ABSEYS are not words at all in the sense that matters — they are spellings that a word list is required to accept.

Combine the five screens and you can sort almost any entry on this page into one of two piles in a few seconds: likely puzzle vocabulary, and game-only material. That split is the single most useful thing you can carry away from a six-letter list.

How the letters distribute across six-letter words

Every list of 22,157 words contains 132,942 letters, and they are not evenly spread. The table below is the full distribution, counted from this dictionary. Percentages are shares of all 132,942 letters, not shares of words.

Four letters carry the language. E, S, A and R account for 49,180 of the 132,942 letters — 37.00% of everything in the list — and E alone takes 12.27%. That share is higher than at any other length on the site: the five-letter list puts E at 10.32% and the seven-letter list at 11.82%. Six letters is where E peaks.

Counted per word rather than per letter, E appears in 13,288 of the 22,157 words, 59.97% of them. A follows in 9,667 words, R in 8,546, I in 7,965 and O in 7,080. Y is the unusual one: it shows up in only 2,834 words (12.79%), but 1,624 of those are the last letter, so Y is far more of an ending at this length than a middle letter.

The rare end of the table is what makes six-letter puzzles interesting. Q appears 229 times (0.17%), X 442 times (0.33%), J 484 times (0.36%), Z 802 times (0.60%) and V 1,304 times (0.98%). Their positions are more revealing than their totals: X begins only 19 words in the entire collection — 0.09% — and Q begins 126. Q never ends a six-letter word at all, and V ends just three of them, with J ending two. Rare letters in English cluster at the front of a word and stay away from the end, and at six letters that rule is almost absolute.

One more positional fact worth holding: 1,572 words in this list start and end with the same letter — AGENDA, ACACIA, ALASKA, ALPACA, ANGORA and the rest. Six letters is long enough for a palindromic skeleton to appear without the word looking like a tongue-twister, which is why so many of them read as Latinate or technical.

The vowel share climbs at this length

Vowels are a share of the letters, and that share moves with length in a way that is easy to miss. Here are all five lengths this site carries, with the vowel share, the E share and the repeat rate computed the same way from the same dictionary.

The pattern is a dip and then a climb. Three-letter words are 39.29% vowels because a single syllable needs a nucleus and the word is short. The share then falls to 36.78% at four letters and bottoms out at 35.94% at five, where consonant clusters start doing real work. At six letters it climbs back to 37.30%, and at seven it holds at 37.23%.

Counted per word, the same trend appears more sharply. 13,173 of the 22,157 six-letter words (59.45%) contain exactly two vowels. 6,485 (29.27%) contain three, 2,041 (9.21%) contain exactly one, and 433 contain four. Two vowels is the default shape of a six-letter word, and it is the same default you find at five letters.

The extremes are fun and instructive. Two words in the entire list have five vowels — ZOAEAE and ZOOEAE, both of them plurals of a five-letter root. Exactly one has six: EUOUAE, the Latin ablative singular of euouae, a sequence of vowels used in chant. The vowels have essentially run out of room by the time you reach six, which is exactly what you would expect from a language that measures words in syllables and gives every syllable a nucleus.

At the other end, 22 six-letter words contain no A, E, I, O or U at all: CRWTHS, CRYPTS, FLYBYS, FLYSCH, GHYLLS, GLYCYL, GLYPHS, LYMPHS, MYRRHS, NYMPHS, PSYCHS, RHYTHM, SPHYNX, SPRYLY, SYLPHS, SYLPHY, SYNCHS, SYNTHS, SYZYGY, TRYSTS, TSKTSK and XYLYLS. Eighteen of those are simply plurals of the five-letter vowel-free words, and the other four are RHYTHM, SPHYNX, SYZYGY and TSKTSK — the standalone members of that tiny corner of the lexicon.

That is a collapse worth noting. Six-letter vowel-free words are 0.099% of this list, against 0.41% at five letters and 0.01% at seven. The site's companion page on five-letter words without vowels covers that corner in detail; at six letters there is barely anything left to cover.

Shape: the patterns that cover six-letter English

Mark every letter of a word as a consonant (C) or a vowel (V) and you get its shape. The 22,157 words in this list use only 57 distinct shapes, and they are not spread evenly at all. Four shapes cover half the collection; eight cover 69.04%.

Read the top line carefully, because it explains a large part of the list. CVCCVC alone accounts for 5,645 words — one in every four. That shape is a past tense or a doubled consonant in a stem, and English produces it mechanically: add -ED to a stem ending in a consonant and you usually get BACKED, BACHED, BADGED, BLAMED, BLANDED, BRACKET. The second most common shape, CVCVCC, is the same idea in reverse: BAKERS, BACONS, BAKING, BAKERY, BALERS.

Only three of the top eight shapes belong to genuinely independent vocabulary — CVCVCV, the clean three-syllable shape, and the two vowel-initial ones. Everything else in the top of the table is inflection wearing a costume. That is the structural counterpart to the suffix counts: the shapes tell you that most six-letter words are built, and the suffixes tell you what they are built from.

Shape is also a practical tool at the board. If you know a six-letter answer has a doubled consonant in the middle and an -ED ending, you can play against the most common shape in the language and rule out the other 49 shapes in one step. And when you are building a word-search grid, the shape tells you which words will fit a run cleanly: CVCVCV words sit in a straight line without awkwardness, while CVCCVC words need a doubled consonant to be visible.

Scrabble value across the six-letter list

The average six-letter word scores 10.47 points with standard English letter values. That average is worth holding against the five-letter figure of 9.17 and the seven-letter figure of 11.82: each extra letter adds roughly one point, which sounds obvious until you remember that the average letter in this list is worth well under two points.

The distribution is not smooth, though. Most of the list sits in a narrow band, and a tiny tail sits far above it.

Only 295 words in the whole collection score 20 points or more, and only 18 score 30 or more. The top of the list is a very short list indeed: QUAZZY takes 36 points, BAZAZZ, BEZAZZ, BIZAZZ, PAZAZZ, PIZAZZ and PIZZAZ take 35 each, ZIZZED takes 34, and JAZZBO, WHIZZY, ZIZZES and ZIZZLE take 33.

The letters that make a six-letter word expensive are the familiar ones. Q and Z are worth 10, J and X are worth 8, K is worth 5, and F, V, W and Y are worth 4. A single X turns a mediocre word into a good one: AFFLUX, ANOXIA, APPOINT-style clusters, AXILLA. A single Z does the same work — ABLAZE, AZALEA, AZERTY, AMAZON.

Here is the part that catches people out at this length. Only 440 words in the list contain an X and only 229 contain a Q. If you are holding an X or a Q in a six-letter rack, you are not choosing between a large vocabulary. You are choosing between a few dozen words, and the useful move is to filter the list by that letter rather than to read it.

Reading a six-letter list against a puzzle board

What follows assumes you are trying to narrow a set of candidate answers rather than browse for pleasure. The filters on this page are the same ones you would apply by hand, and the order below is the order that actually saves time.

Start with the opening letter, because it is the single most informative constraint available. S begins 2,664 words (12.02% of the list), C begins 1,756 (7.93%), B begins 1,566 (7.07%), P begins 1,541 (6.95%) and T begins 1,331 (6.01%). At the other end, X begins 19 words, Q begins 126, Z begins 145, Y begins 177 and J begins 318. A green opening letter of S leaves you more than a hundred times more work than a green X does.

Next use the ending, which is even more lopsided. S closes 6,360 words (28.70%), E closes 2,627 (11.85%), D closes 2,482 (11.20%), R closes 1,997 (9.01%) and Y closes 1,624 (7.33%). Everything else is below 1,200. The four endings S, E, D and R account for 13,466 words, 60.77% of the entire list. If your puzzle has told you nothing about the last letter, a guess ending in S is the statistically strongest place to start; if it has told you the last letter is a vowel, the candidate set collapses to a manageable size almost immediately.

Third, use the vowel count. Two vowels is 59.45% of the list, three is 29.27%, one is 9.21%. When a six-letter puzzle gives you a pattern, the number of vowels in it is often the most valuable piece of the pattern you have, and it is invisible unless you are looking at the right list.

Fourth, use the repeated-letter question. 11,795 words in this list (53.23%) contain a letter more than once, and 736 contain a letter three or more times. So the odds are better than even that a six-letter answer has a doubled letter, and the odds are roughly one in thirty that it has a tripled one. If a puzzle says the answer has no repeated letters, you have just removed 53.23% of the candidates. The site's page on five-letter words with double letters covers the same idea at five letters in more detail.

Fifth, and last, use the letters you already know. Type them into the include box on the tool. Type a letter twice if the puzzle says it appears twice. Type the letters you want gone into the exclude box. The counter above the list tells you how many words survive, and the chips above it show you how many of those start with each letter.

Why Scrabble players still want the long tail

It is a fair question. Almost half this list is derived forms, a third of it is cluster plurals that are legal but worthless on a board, and the highest-scoring 18 words in it are so obscure that nobody plays them outside a tournament. Why keep the tail?

The first answer is hooks. 6,360 words end in S, and in Scrabble a trailing S is worth a whole extra point on a double-letter square. The plural of a word you can already play is often a better word than the singular. A list that stopped at independent vocabulary would hide most of your scoring opportunities.

The second is legality. Scrabble players have to know what is allowed, not only what is sensible. A word you have never heard of may still be legal, and if you do not have a list that includes it you will pass on a scoring play you could have made. The cluster plurals — ALKYDS, AHOLDS, ABANDS and their neighbours — are exactly this: worthless-looking words that are, in fact, playable, and that turn an otherwise dead rack into a move.

The third is the premium tiles. The words worth 30 points or more all live in the tail: QUAZZY, BAZAZZ, ZIZZED, JAZZBO, FRIZZY, HUZZAH. They are only 18 words out of 22,157, but they are the words that end a game. A list that stops at common vocabulary does not contain them.

The fourth is the fourth, the doubled letters. 736 six-letter words have a letter three or more times, and those are the words you reach for when the board has a triple-letter square and your rack has two copies of a good letter. If the list is trimmed of game forms, the best play on the board is often the one that is missing.

And the fifth answer is the practical one: a solver that returns nothing is worse than a solver that returns something unfamiliar. The long tail is what stops a player spending three minutes trying to invent a word that is already on the list.

Where this list fits in the site's other tools

Six letters is long enough that a single list stops being enough on its own, and short enough that you can still reason about it. These are the pages that combine well with this one.

• The complete five-letter index is the length most players work in, and it shares the same dictionary, so a five-letter inflected form and its six-letter plural sit next to each other across the two pages.
• The five-letter word generator produces patterns rather than a list, which is useful when you want candidates that fit a grid rather than everything that exists.
• The word finder handles anagram and pattern problems across every length at once.
• The Scrabble solver works from an actual rack, including board bonuses and hooks, which is the version you want when the board matters rather than the length.
• The two-letter word list is where most of the actual board-clearing work happens.
• The Boggle solver is the one to use for grid puzzles, where the constraint is adjacency rather than length.
• The word search maker builds hidden-word grids from word lists, and six-letter words are a good length to hide — long enough to be a puzzle, short enough to be findable.
• The Spelling Bee word list is the curated, everyday-only counterpart to this dictionary, which is exactly the filter you want when the dictionary is too generous.
• The Wordle answer statistics and the Wordle answer archive cover the published daily-answer set, which is the opposite of a dictionary: a short, curated, mainstream list.

The limits of this list

Be clear about what this is. It is a full English dictionary, not a tournament word list and not a puzzle answer list, and it behaves differently from both.

It contains a great deal of inflection, because English has a great deal of inflection: 47.76% of the entries end in S, ED, ES, ER or ING. It contains dialect, historical and technical forms, which is why RHYTHM, SPHYNX and SYZYGY sit alongside SYZYGY-like oddities in the vowel-free corner. It contains forms that exist mainly so the game lexicons can accept them, which is the ALKYDS and AHOLDS crowd.

It is not the official Scrabble tournament lexicon. The two lists overlap heavily, but they are not identical, and if you are playing in a tournament the official word list is the authority. It is also not an answer list for any published daily six-letter game, because no such game exists with a published answer key you could check against — but the general principle holds: a dictionary tells you what can be typed, not what will be asked.

Finally, remember what is being counted. This page counts letters in the spelling. Whether a word sounds like it has a vowel is a separate question, and for words like RHYTHM, NYMPHS and SPRYLY the two answers differ. The count of 22 is the count of spellings without an A, E, I, O or U.

And one practical note about the tool itself: because the collection holds 22,157 words, the on-page list is trimmed for speed. The Show more button loads the next block, the oldest rows drop off once more than 1,200 are in the page, and Copy all always grabs the complete matching set rather than only what is visible. Nothing is hidden from you permanently — it is just delivered in blocks so the page stays responsive on a phone.