Boggle 6-Letter Words — 22,157 to Find

What a six-letter word is worth

The scoring curve in this game treats six letters as the third step. Three- and four-letter words score 1 point each, five-letter words 2, six-letter words 3, seven-letter words 5, and words of eight letters or more 11 points.

That means a six-letter word is worth three times a three-letter word, and one and a half times a five-letter word. Measured over 2,000 randomly rolled boards of each size, six-letter words are 7.01% of all the words on a 4×4 board but 14.54% of all the points, and on a 5×5 board they are 13.70% of the words and 20.97% of the points — second only to the five-letter band. The ratio of points to words roughly doubles from five letters to six, because the value per word goes up while the number of them does not go up nearly as fast.

There is a second reason the six-letter band matters, and it is not about points at all. A five-letter word can be found two different ways on a busy board, and a four-letter word usually can be. A six-letter word needs one specific route through six specific dice, and the chance of two people tracing that same route is much lower. In a round where duplicate words are struck off, that is what makes a six-letter find worth the time it costs to look for it.

How rare are six-letter words

Rolling the site's own 4×4 and 5×5 dice 2,000 times each and solving every board exhaustively gives the numbers that matter.

On the small board the distribution is lumpy in a way that matters. The best 4×4 board in the sample held 98 six-letter words. The worst held none. Those 184 empty boards are the ones where a six-letter word was simply not available, and they cluster on boards dealt with a narrow run of letters.

On the big board the minimum is 2 and the median is 48, a twenty-fourfold spread between the quietest and the median board. The variety also goes up. Across the 2,000 4×4 rolls, 9,204 distinct six-letter words appeared at least once, 41.54% of the list. Across the 2,000 5×5 rolls, 10,713 distinct words appeared, 48.35%. Even on the bigger board, more than half of the 22,157 words on this page never appeared in 2,000 rounds, which tells you how much of this list is depth you will only ever reach by accident.

Which letters carry the list

Six-letter English words lean on E harder than five-letter words do. E appears 16,308 times across the 132,942 letters in this list, 12.27% of the total, and it sits inside 13,288 separate words — 59.96% of the entire list. S follows at 12,258 appearances across 10,242 words, then A on 11,217, R on 9,397 and I on 8,669. At the bottom, Q appears 229 times, X 442 and J 484.

Start letters follow the same distribution but flatter still. S opens 2,664 words, then C on 1,756, B on 1,566, P on 1,541 and T on 1,331. At the far end X opens just 19 words, Q opens 126 and Z opens 145. Endings are dominated by S as well: 6,360 six-letter words end in S, 28.70% of the list, followed by E on 2,627 and D on 2,482. No six-letter word in the list ends in Q, and only two end in J.

What the dice can and cannot spell

As at five letters, the dice decide what is possible, and the two board sizes behave very differently.

The 16 dice in this site's 4×4 set cover all 26 letters, but seven of them appear on exactly one cube each: B and J share the ABBJOO cube, F and K share AFFKPS, Q is on HIMNQU, X is on DEILRX and Z is on HLNNRZ. A word needing two copies of a letter on a single cube is unspellable, and so is a word needing two different letters that share that cube. Worked through exactly, that rules out 996 of the 22,157 six-letter words, which is 4.50% of the list.

Those 996 split cleanly three ways. 753 need two copies of a letter that only one cube carries — ABBACY, AFFAIR, ABSORB and AFFLUX among them, with B alone accounting for 287 of them and F for 235. Another 140 need two different letters off the same cube, which is why ABJECT, ABJURE, BANJOS and ALFAKI can never be spelled on a small board. The remaining 103 are tight combinations such as CYCLIC, COCCUS and COCKUP, where the crowding runs out before the letters do.

The 5×5 set is a bigger constraint. Its 25 dice carry only 19 distinct letters, so B, J, K, Q, V, X and Z never appear on a 5×5 board at all. That makes 7,412 of the 22,157 six-letter words on this page, 33.45% of the list, unreachable on the big board no matter how they are arranged. Every Q word, every X word and every Z word is in that group, along with 7,380 words that carry one of the missing letters. A further 32, all of them with a doubled W, are unspellable on a big board for a different reason: W is carried by a single cube in that set, so the two Ws would have to come off the same die.

These percentages are exact rather than sampled, because each die independently shows one of its own faces. Taken word by word, the chance that every distinct letter a six-letter word needs is present somewhere on the board is 2.90% on a 4×4 board and 5.73% on a 5×5 board. Those are necessary conditions only, since adjacency and the no-reuse rule cut much further, but they show why six-letter words are so much harder to arrange than five-letter ones: every extra letter in the word is another chance to need a letter the board does not have.

Q and U: separate tiles, and what that costs you

The classic printed game puts Qu on a single cube face, so one throw covers both letters. This site's version does not. Q and U are separate tiles here, and a word like EQUITY needs a Q die and an adjacent U die — two different cubes, both showing the right letter, next to each other.

The dice make that concrete. On the 4×4 set, Q sits on exactly one of the sixteen dice, the HIMNQU cube, while U appears on three: CIMOTU, EEINSU and HIMNQU. Because a die shows one face at a time, a Q word needs the Q face on that one cube and a U from a different one. A Q shows on 16.67%% of 4×4 boards, a U on 42.13%%, and both together on only 5.09%%.

On the 5×5 set there is no Q on any of the 25 dice, so the probability of a Q appearing on a big board is zero. That rules out 209 six-letter words containing QU and another 16 that carry a Q without a U, on every 5×5 board this site deals — which is a large share of the most interesting band in the list.

Those 16 are worth knowing by heart, because they are the words a small board with no vowels can still surprise you with: FAQIRS, NIQABS, QABALA, QANATS, QASIDA, QAWWAL, QIBLAS, QIGONG, QINDAR, QINTAR, QORMAS, QWERTY, SHEQEL, TALAQS, TRANQS and YAQONA. All of them need a Q, and none of them needs a U, so they are playable on a board with no U on it — but only a 4×4 board, because the 5×5 dice have no Q either way.

If you are hunting on a big board, a Q word is off the table entirely. If you are hunting on a small board, a Q word is the hardest thing on it to find and the most likely to be yours alone.

Repeated letters are the norm at this length

11,795 of the 22,157 six-letter words, 53.23% of the list, contain at least one letter twice. The most doubled letters are E in 2,766 words, S in 1,894, A in 1,451 and O in 1,056. At the rare end J is doubled in 10 words and X in only 2.

That is a much higher rate than at five letters, where 35.78% of words repeat a letter, and it changes how you should search. With six letters and a double in the middle, the word looks like ABACAB. Start from the double rather than from the word: if a board has two E dice, there is a whole family of six-letter words that need both of them and nothing else repeated.

The dice put a hard limit on how far that goes. On the 4×4 set, B, F, J, K, Q, X and Z each sit on exactly one cube, so a doubled B, F, J, K, Q, X or Z is unspellable there — 753 of the 11,795 doubled words in this list. On the 5×5 set, W is the only letter carried by a single cube, and the 32 words with a doubled W, such as WIGWAG, WIGWAM, POWWOW and CYCLIC, can be spelled on a small board but never on a big one.

The shape of a six-letter word

Six letters allow 57 distinct consonant-vowel shapes, more than twice the 30 available at five letters, and the distribution is concentrated at the top. CVCCVC is the most common at 5,645 words, 25.48% of the list. CVCVCC follows at 2,648 words (11.95%), then CCVCVC at 1,432 (6.46%), CVVCVC at 1,359 (6.13%), CVCVCV at 1,171 (5.29%) and CCVCCC at 1,137 (5.13%).

Counting vowels gives a simpler picture again. Two vowels is the standard arrangement at 13,173 words, 59.45% of the list. Three vowels come next at 6,485 words (29.27%), one vowel at 2,041 (9.21%) and four vowels at 433 (1.95%). Only 22 words have no vowel at all, and the only word in the entire list made entirely of vowels is EUOUAE. Two words reach five vowels, ZOAEAE and ZOOEAE.

For scanning purposes the dominant CVCCVC shape is the one to learn. It is a consonant, a vowel, two consonants, a vowel and a consonant — and given a board, you can look for two consonants with a vowel between them, then two more consonants on the end.

Endings

Six-letter words are heavily inflected, and the endings are where the points cluster. 6,360 end in S, 28.70% of the list. Another 2,068 end in ED, 1,660 in ES, 1,638 in ER, 517 in ING, 382 in LY, 371 in ERS, 105 in EST, 54 in IST, 39 in ISM, 12 in TION, 11 in ABLE and 7 in MENT.

The ED and ER endings are proportionally much more important at six letters than at five, because a verb stem has to be long enough to carry them. That means every three- or four-letter verb on the board has a three-point extension attached if the letters are there, and it is worth checking every time you find one.

The words worth hunting

Six-letter words are worth three points and they need one specific route, so the rare-letter words are the ones to chase. X appears in 440 six-letter words, Q in 229, J in 474 and Z in 686, against E in 13,288 words.

There is a second measure, and it needs stating carefully. The site also ships a frequency-ordered vocabulary of 80,000 common English words. Cross-referencing it against this list, 6,081 of the 22,157 six-letter words appear in that file and 16,076 do not, with the median appearing word sitting around rank 26,900 out of 80,000. That is a frequency ordering of English words, not a measurement of what Boggle players write down. What it tells you is that this list is mostly dictionary depth: the commonest six-letter words in that ordering are PEOPLE, UNITED, DURING, BEFORE, STATES, SECOND and POLICE, while the rare end holds words like UNCLOG, GILLET, PONTIC, DOLMEN and MADDER. The rare end is where the points are.

Six-letter words with no vowel

Twenty-two words in this list contain no A, E, I, O or U, which is 0.10% of the total — CRYPTS, GLYPHS, LYMPHS, NYMPHS, PSYCHS, RHYTHM, SPHYNX, SYLPHS, SYZYGY, TRYSTS, TSKTSK and a handful more. Only two of the 22 also leave out Y: CRWTHS and TSKTSK.

On a 5×5 board this is the category that pays, because that set is rich in consonants and light on vowels — 23 of its 25 dice carry an E or an A, and the rest are heavily consonant-loaded. A board where the vowels are clustered in one corner is a board that produces rhyme clusters rather than ordinary words, and the list above is where those come from.

How to use this list in a round

Type every letter you can see, including duplicates, into the include box and the list collapses to the six-letter words you could build from what is on the board. Sort by the commonest letter first to sweep the reliable three-point finds, then switch to the rarest letter first for the words nobody else will have.

If a board looks empty, exclude the letters you cannot see and read what is left. If a board looks full, type a rare letter into the exclude box and see what disappears, which tells you how much of the board was resting on that one letter.

For practice, play a timed round in the playable Boggle game, then run the same board through the Boggle solver and compare your lists. This page is where you check whether the six-letter word you missed was even on the board.

What this list is, and what it is not

Two limits, stated plainly.

First, this is the site's own 267,751-word English dictionary filtered to six letters. It carries plural forms, inflections, archaic spellings and borrowed words alongside ordinary vocabulary. Proper nouns are mostly filtered out, but not entirely: fourteen six-letter country and language names were checked against it — FRANCE, MEXICO, POLAND, NORWAY, SWEDEN, GHANA, NEPAL, CHAD, ISRAEL, KUWAIT, LIBYA, SUDAN, SYRIA and YEMEN — and every one of them is absent, while four that also work as ordinary English words are present, namely BRAZIL, CANADA, RUSSIA and PANAMA. A dictionary of this kind is not filtered for offensiveness either, so check anything you are about to claim against the rules you agreed on.

Second, and more important: this list is about what is possible, not what is likely. More than half of it never turned up in 2,000 simulated 5×5 rounds, and a third of it cannot be spelled on a 5×5 board at all. A word being here says nothing about whether you will find it, and a word being absent says only that this particular dictionary does not carry it. Different Boggle apps ship different dictionaries, which is why a solver may report a word your app rejects.

For the rest of the length range, the Boggle words by length page links every list together. The three-letter list is the broad floor of the game, the four-letter list is where most of a board's cheap points live, the five-letter list is the band that scores best, and the seven-letter list holds the rarest finds. The Boggle guide covers the rules and scoring in full, the word finder and the unscramble tool handle the anagram side of the problem, and the complete six-letter word list has the full dictionary with filters for doubles and missing vowels.