Scrabble 6-Letter Words — All 22,157 With Points

Why 22,157 six-letter words is a Scrabble problem before it is a vocabulary problem

The number is worth sitting with. This site's dictionary holds 12,478 five-letter words, 22,157 six-letter words and 32,909 seven-letter words. Moving from five to six adds 9,679 entries — 77.5 percent more words than the entire five-letter list. That sounds like a lot of extra choices, and for a word-guessing puzzle it is, but for Scrabble it is something else entirely.

On a board you are never choosing from 22,157 words. You are choosing from the handful that your seven tiles and the current layout can actually reach, and that handful is drawn from a dictionary in which nearly half the entries are inflections. Six letters is the first length at which adding a single letter to a shorter word produces a valid word in bulk. 6,360 words in this list — 28.70 percent of the 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 percent of the list, are derived forms rather than independent vocabulary.

You can be precise about it. 5,567 words — 25.13 percent of the whole collection — are exactly a five-letter word from this same dictionary with an S attached. Another 1,337 are a four-letter word plus ED, and 883 are a four-letter word plus ER. That is the shape of the six-letter list: a core of ordinary vocabulary with a very large grammatical fringe attached to it.

The long tail is not a defect, and it is not padding. It is the reason a Scrabble player needs a list at all. 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. A trailing S is worth a full extra point on a double-letter square, so the plural of a word you can already play is often a better play than the singular. And the premium tiles — the ones worth 8, 10 and 4 points — are exactly the letters that hide in the tail.

Telling a playable word from an obscure form

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

Apply all three tests at once and you land on a specific group. A six-letter word counts as everyday core when it satisfies three conditions: it is not a marked inflection, it contains none of the four premium letters J, Q, X or Z, and it has no run of three consonants in a row. That combination leaves 8,107 words — 36.59 percent of the list — and they are the words that behave like ordinary English. The other 14,050 words are the long tail, and they behave in a completely different way.

Test one: read it from the right

If a word ends in S, ES, ED, ER, ING, ERS, IES, LY or D, it is very probably a derived form, and the front of the word is the real thing. ABASES is ABASE. ABATED is ABATE. ANGLER is ANGLE. AISLED is AISLE. These are not separate entries in the mind of a player; they are one entry with a grammatical hat on. 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, you are probably looking at a form that exists for the games rather than for conversation.

Test two: look for the crowded ending

1,059 words — 4.78 percent of the list — end in a consonant, a consonant and then an S. That pattern is the signature of a game-only inflection: ABAMPS, ABANDS, ABOHMS, ABORDS, ABORTS, ABYSMS, ADAPTS, ADEEPTS, ADOPTS, ADORNS. Ordinary English does not pluralise a stem by dumping a silent letter and then an S. If you spot the shape, you have found a word that will be legal and will never be conversational. It is still playable, and sometimes it is the only thing your rack can make.

Test three: try saying it

The third test is the oldest one in the trade. A word that cannot be said without three consonants in a row is a spelling rather than a word. WHIFFY and WHACKY both carry a double F; WHISKY and SKYHOOK both end on a consonant run. That is why the everyday core above excludes words like WHISKY even though everybody knows it, and it is a fair trade: the core is a shape test, not a fame test, and it will occasionally reject a perfectly ordinary word while admitting an unusual one. The core is a screen for where to look first, not a verdict.

Read that table as a single sentence: every six-letter word in this dictionary worth 20 points or more is in the long tail, and the everyday core tops out at 19. The ordinary words are the ones you say at a table; the tail is the part that pays.

Which six-letter words actually get played

Two groups matter, and they are worth learning for opposite reasons. The first group is the everyday core: words you will recognise instantly, worth enough to score on any board, and easy to build because they use ordinary letters. The second group is the top of the tail: eighteen words that sit at 30 points or above, which is where the best plays in the whole length live.

Two details from that table are worth more than the list itself. First, every one of those words ends in a two-letter tail that hooks easily: Y, K, P, T, R, N. That is not an accident. Across the everyday core the most common endings are IE (345 words), EN (290), AL (283), ET (275), ON (243), IN (230), AN (206), IC (200) and TE (197). Learn those nine endings and you have a hook available against almost any open letter on the board.

Second, notice which letters do the work. HAWKEY, CHUKKA, HOCKEY, KICKUP and VIVIFY all score well because they contain a K (5 points), a C (3) or a V (4) — letters that are ordinary enough to appear in words you would say out loud but expensive enough to be worth aiming at a premium square.

The list above shows twelve of the eighteen. The pattern is the point: every one of them is built on a pair of Z tiles, and Z is worth 10. Doubling a Z is the single largest scoring decision available at this length, and the words that make it are legal, printable and worth learning even though you will rarely get the tiles.

Between the everyday plays and the glories sits the material most players actually use: the words holding a premium letter in an otherwise ordinary frame. Exactly 1,806 words in this list — 8.15 percent — contain a J, a Q, an X or a Z. There are 229 with a Q, 440 with an X, 474 with a J and 686 with a Z, plus 1,261 words carrying a V. Filter the tool on a single premium letter and you will find your playable dumps in seconds: the Q page of your own brain is a list of a couple of hundred words, and a couple of hundred words is learnable.

How the shape of a word changes its score

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 the shape predicts the score better than the length does. That is the finding that matters on a board, so it is worth a table.

The pattern is clear. CCVCCC — a cluster, a vowel, then another cluster — averages 12.29 points across 1,137 words, while CVCVVC, a pair of short syllables, averages 9.54. The gap is not about the letters being unusual. It is about how many expensive letters a shape can carry. A word with two consonant clusters has more than one chance of picking up a J, an X, a Z or a V, and each of those letters is worth 8, 8, 10 or 4 instead of 1.

Push the same idea to its limit and you reach the extreme shapes. Among shapes with at least 40 words, CCCCVC averages 13.59 points across 204 words, and CVCCCC averages 13.18 across 350. At the bottom, VVCVVC averages 7.29 and VVCVCV averages 7.80. Words that begin with two vowels and then stumble into consonants are cheap, and words that are almost all consonants are expensive. Four consonants and a vowel is close to the most expensive shape English has.

There is a parallel way to see this, through the vowel count. Fewer vowels means fewer chances to use the cheap letters, which means the expensive ones crowd in.

The trend is steep and it runs opposite to the intuition most players start with. A word with four vowels averages 8.89 points. A word with one vowel averages 12.49. The drop from one vowel to four vowels is 3.6 points, which on a single play is the difference between a routine turn and a good one.

The zero-vowel row looks like a gift and is not. Those 22 words are CRWTHS, CRYPTS, FLYBYS, FLYSCH, GHYLLS, GLYCYL, GLYPHS, LYMPHS, MYRRHS, NYMPHS, PSYCHS, RHYTHM, SPHYNX, SPRYLY, SYLPHS, SYLPHY, SYNCHS, SYNTHS, SYZYGY, TRYSTS, TSKTSK and XYLYLS. Eighteen are plurals of five-letter vowel-free words, and the other four are RHYTHM, SPHYNX, SYZYGY and TSKTSK. Their 15.55 average comes from that tiny corner of the lexicon, not from a rule you can exploit. At six letters there is nothing left of the vowel-free corner to learn.

The practical use of all this is a rule for building a word. If you have a rack of consonants and one vowel, aim for the expensive shapes: two clusters and a single vowel will usually beat three vowels and three cheap consonants. If your rack is vowel-heavy, take the clean shapes and play them across the board rather than into a premium square. Shape is the cheapest way to estimate a score before you commit.

The letters that carry the score

The whole list contains 132,942 letters, and they are not evenly spread. Percentages below are shares of all 132,942 letters, not shares of words.

E, S, A and R alone account for 49,180 of the 132,942 letters — 37 percent of everything in the list — and E alone takes 12.27 percent. That is the highest E share of any length the site carries. Counted per word rather than per letter, E appears in 13,288 of the 22,157 words, 59.97 percent of them, and S in 10,242, 46.22 percent.

The rare end of the table is where the points are. Q appears 229 times, 0.17 percent of all letters; X appears 442 times, J 484 times, Z 802 times and V 1,304 times. Their positions are even more restricted than their totals. Only 19 six-letter words in the entire dictionary begin with X, against 2,664 that begin with S and 1,756 that begin with C. Q never appears as the final letter of a six-letter word at all. V ends just three of them, and J ends 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 nearly absolute.

The endings tell the same story from the other side. S closes 6,360 words (28.70 percent), 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. Four endings — S, E, D and R — account for 13,466 words, 60.77 percent of the list. That is why a trailing S is such a good target when you are building a word: the shape is common, the play is nearly always available, and the extra point on a double-letter square is real money.

One more positional fact worth holding: 1,572 words in this list begin 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.

Where the points actually sit

The average six-letter word scores 10.47 points with standard English letter values. That works out at 1.74 points per tile, which is a useful baseline: if your play is scoring about 1.7 points a letter, you have found nothing special.

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

Only 295 words in the whole collection score 20 points or more, 83 score 25 or more, and just 18 score 30 or more. So when you filter this list for points, expect a short answer. Set the minimum to 18 and you are looking at 504 words; set it to 20 and you are looking at 295.

Using the list at the board

A length list and a rack solver answer different questions, and you want both in the same session. This page is the vocabulary: what exists, what it scores, and which of it is playable. The Scrabble solver is the geometry: it takes your actual tiles and returns the words you can make right now, with hooks and board bonuses applied.

Work through a turn in this order. First, type the letters your rack holds into the include box on this page — with a duplicate letter typed twice if you hold two copies. Second, set a minimum score that matches the board. On a blank stretch of board, anything from 10 points up is fine; over a double-letter square, push it to 14; over a triple-letter square, push it to 18. Third, narrow by the letter you want to open with, using the buttons above the list, and read the top of the sorted results.

Then check the board, because the list does not know the board. A six-letter word is only a play if it can be placed legally, which means at least one letter touching the existing play, and if you are hooking, the first letter of your word has to match the letter it sits against. That is the step the Scrabble finder handles for you in one click, including the bonus squares, so use it once you have narrowed the field down to two or three candidates.

Two more filters earn their keep in almost every game. The exclude box removes letters you would rather not place — type a Q or an X when you want to hold them for a better square, or exclude a letter you have just used up so the tool stops suggesting the same word. And the sort by points puts the highest-scoring plays at the top of the list, which on a rack with a premium tile is usually the answer you want in the first three rows.

If you play alone, the Scrabble solitaire version of the solver takes a single hand and works the same way. If you are building a study list rather than a turn, the site's general six-letter word index covers the same dictionary from the puzzle side, and the seven-letter list is where the bingos live.

The limits of this list

Be clear about what this is. It is a full English dictionary with Scrabble scoring attached, not a tournament lexicon 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 percent 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 in the vowel-free corner alongside more conversational words. And it contains forms that exist mainly so the game lexicons can accept them, which is the ALKYDS and AHOLDS crowd. All of that is legal material and all of it can score.

The scores shown here are face values only. They do not include premium squares, cross-word bonuses or the 50-point bonus for using all seven tiles, because those depend on the board and not on the word. The 50-point figure is the one number in the game that is worth remembering off the top of your head: it is why a seven-tile play is worth chasing, and why the two-letter word list is a poor substitute for one.

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

Finally, a note on 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. The counter never lies: it always reports the true number of matching words.