Scrabble 7-Letter Words — All 32,909 With Points

Seven letters is where the game is decided

This site's dictionary holds 12,478 five-letter words, 22,157 six-letter words and 32,909 seven-letter words. Six to seven adds 10,752 entries, and the jump from six to seven is the single largest step in the whole list. That is not a coincidence. A rack contains seven tiles, and a seven-letter word is the only play that spends all of them in one go.

That single fact reorganises everything about the length. At six letters you are choosing from a large pool of medium plays. At seven letters you are choosing between a handful of bingos and a much larger pool of ordinary words, and the difference between those two outcomes is worth 50 bonus points on top of the word itself. A rack that supports one good bingo and a rack that supports none are not nearly the same position, even if they look identical on the tiles.

The list is also the most inflected of the three. 18,387 of the 32,909 words — 55.87 percent — end in a standard inflection marker: S, ES, ED, ER or ING. 11,036 words (33.53 percent) end in S alone, 3,190 in ES, 2,853 in ED, 2,382 in ER and 2,116 in ING. Another 9,424 words (28.64 percent) are exactly a six-letter word from this dictionary with an S attached, and 1,428 are a five-letter word plus ED, 1,408 are a four-letter word plus ING, 771 are a five-letter word plus ER and 732 are a five-letter word plus ES.

So more than half of the seven-letter list exists because English adds endings. That is the background hum behind every decision you make at this length, and it is the reason a bingo you find on your own is worth more than a bingo you only recognise after three minutes of looking.

What a bingo actually requires

A bingo is one play that uses all seven tiles on your rack. In a straight Scrabble layout that means a seven-letter word laid across seven squares, and the 50-point bonus is added on top of the word's own score. A six-letter play leaves one tile behind; a seven-letter play leaves nothing.

That makes the question "can I make a bingo from this rack?" a question you can answer with a list, and the answer is usually not obvious. Take four ordinary racks and count the seven-letter words each one supports in this dictionary.

Look at what those numbers mean in practice. The AEINRST rack offers eleven ways to spend every tile, several of them everyday words, and one of them — RETAIN or RETINAS — is worth 7 points on its own, which sounds poor until you remember that the bonus is on top. The AENRSTU rack offers three, all of them words you have to think about. The AELRSTY rack offers one. The DEILRST rack offers nothing at all, and that rack is not a bad hand in any other respect: it has five usable consonants, two vowels and no premium tiles.

This is the practical lesson of the whole length. A rack is not good or bad in the abstract; it is good or bad depending on how many seven-letter words it supports. Eleven options and one option are different positions even when the tiles look similar. When you want to judge a rack quickly, count its bingos before you judge anything else.

It is also worth noticing what those bingos are made of. RETAINS, STAINER, NATURES and SAUNTER are all ordinary words built from common letters. That is not a rarity; it is the pattern. The everyday seven-letter words are mostly combinations of short familiar roots with a standard ending, and the endings are what turn a six-letter play into a seven-letter one.

Building the highest-scoring opener from a rack

An opening is a seven-letter word played across a blank board, and it sets up everything that follows. Two questions decide which one you play: how many tiles does it consume, and what does it leave behind.

The first question is about the opening letter. The second is about the score, and the two pull in different directions, so take them in order.

How many words each letter can open

S begins 3,843 seven-letter words, 11.68 percent of the entire list. C begins 2,771, P begins 2,524, B begins 2,290 and T begins 1,937. Those five letters open 13,365 words between them, 40.61 percent of the collection. At the other end, X begins 26 words, Y 167, Q 174 and Z 199.

The practical reading is that a rack with an S in it is a rack with options. A rack with an X in it is a rack with one or two options and a high score attached to whichever you find, because X is worth 8 points and it appears in only 665 seven-letter words in the whole dictionary.

What each letter is worth on average

The average score of the words each letter opens tells a different story, and it is the more interesting one for an opening play.

Read the two tables together and you get the whole opening decision. An S opens the most words but the least valuable ones on average, because S is worth one point and the words that begin with S are ordinary. A Z opens only 199 words but they average 19.80 points. An X opens 26 words and they average 17.23.

The rule that follows is simple and it holds up in play. Open with a rare letter when you have one, because it scores more and because the board is empty so nothing is blocked. Open with a common letter when the rack has no rare letter in it, because then the value is in what you leave behind rather than in the word you play.

The words worth having seen before

A handful of seven-letter words are worth recognising on sight, because they are the ones that decide a game when the tiles appear. Three of them sit at 45 points, which is the highest in this list: PIZZAZZ, PAZZAZZ and BEZZAZZ. ZYZZYVA follows on 43, PIZAZZY on 39 and PZAZZES on 36. QUIZZED, ZIZZLED, ZIZZING and JAZZILY all take 35.

Every one of those is built on two Z tiles, and that is the lesson in miniature. Doubling a Z is worth 20 points before a single premium square is involved. If you want a shortcut for the whole length, learn to spot the double-Z family and the double-Q family, because those are the words that turn a rack of awkward tiles into the best play on the board.

The 30 percent that are everyday vocabulary

Roughly three words in ten in this list are ordinary vocabulary rather than grammar wearing a costume, and the difference between those two groups is the difference between a word you play and a word you skip.

The group is easy to define with a rule you can apply in your head. A seven-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 leaves 9,698 words — 29.47 percent of the list — and those are the words you would recognise without thinking.

Four differences jump out of that table, and they are the differences you should expect between the two groups.

The everyday words score lower. The core averages 11.21 points against 12.08 for the tail, and the gap widens as you move up the scale. The core tops out at 23 (KICKOFF and FUCKOFF); the tail reaches 45. Every one of the 39 seven-letter words worth 30 points or more sits in the tail, because all of them contain a Z or a J.

The everyday words are built from ordinary letters. By definition the core contains no J, Q, X or Z, so it also contains almost none of the score. Those 2,599 premium-letter words are 7.90 percent of the list and they carry every word worth 30 or more.

The everyday words repeat letters more. 6,718 of the 9,698 core words repeat a letter, 69.27 percent of the core, against 15,392 of 23,211 in the tail. That is not a weakness. Repetition is how ordinary English works at seven letters: LANTERN, SURFACE, CAPTAIN, BLANKET and CABBAGE are all doubled or tripled somewhere, and the doubling is what lets a modest rack produce a clean word.

The everyday words end on a hookable tail. Across the core, the most common two-letter endings are ST (483 words), TE (408), IC (344), AL (330), LE (320), NE (311), SH (288), ON (269), SE (257) and EN (242). Every one of those is a clean consonant-vowel pair, which is exactly what you want when you are placing a word alongside something already on the board.

LANTERN is in that table for a reason that has nothing to do with its score. Seven points is nothing. What matters is that it spends all seven tiles, sets up a double-letter square in the middle of the board and leaves you with a rack of A, E, I and one of the two N tiles. A low-scoring bingo that leaves a good rack is often worth more than a high-scoring one that leaves four consonants.

One honest caveat about the core. It is a shape test, not a fame test, and it makes mistakes in both directions. It rejects some perfectly ordinary words — JOURNEY because of the J, PUMPKIN because of the MPK cluster, DIAMOND because it ends in a marked inflection. It also admits the occasional oddity. Read it as a place to start looking, not as a verdict on any single word.

How the shape of a word changes its score

Mark every letter as a consonant (C) or a vowel (V) and you get the shape. The 32,909 words in this list use 109 distinct shapes, and the shape predicts the score better than the length does.

The heaviest shapes score best. CVCCCVC averages 13.21 points across 1,977 words, and among shapes with at least 40 words the leaders are CCCC VCC at 15.44 points across 183 words, CCCCCVC at 15.37 across 76, CVCCCCC at 15.33 across 64 and CCVCCCC at 15.32 across 185. At the bottom, VVCCVVC averages 9.10 across 63 words and VVCVCVC averages 9.44 across 97. Four consonants in a row is nearly the most expensive shape English has, and a word built that way is almost always carrying a J, an X, a Z or a V.

The vowel count says the same thing in a simpler form.

Three vowels is the default shape of a seven-letter word at 46.56 percent, with two vowels close behind at 43.35 percent. But the score runs the other way from the frequency: one-vowel words average 15.12 points and four-vowel words average 10.57. Each vowel you add takes about a point and a half off the average word, because vowels are the cheap letters and consonants are where the money is.

The zero-vowel corner has shrunk to almost nothing. There are exactly four seven-letter words with no A, E, I, O or U: GLYCYLS, NYMPHLY, RHYTHMS and TSKTSKS. Three of them are plurals, and the fourth is a sound a fox makes. At five letters there were 51 such words and at six letters 22, but at seven there are four, and the trend is clear: English cannot keep seven letters together without a vowel to carry the word.

For an opening, that gives you a real rule. A rack of one vowel and six consonants is a high-scoring rack in waiting, and the words it produces will be shaped like CVCCCVC or similar — heavy in the middle. A rack of four vowels and three consonants is a low-scoring rack that needs a clean shape such as CVCVCVC to work at all. Know which kind you are holding before you look for the word.

The letters and the endings

The whole list contains 230,363 letters. Percentages below are shares of all 230,363 letters, not shares of words.

E leads with 11.82 percent of all letters and appears in 21,368 individual words, 64.93 percent of the list. S is second at 9.43 percent and appears in 17,878 words, 54.33 percent. I is the third most common letter per word — 15,642 words, 47.53 percent — which is unusual at this length, because I is usually a word-initial letter rather than a word-internal one.

The rare end of the table is where the points live. Q appears 398 times, 0.17 percent of all letters; J appears 644 times, X 668 times, Z 1,118 times and V 1,978 times. Their positions are more restricted than their totals. Only 26 seven-letter words begin with X, 167 begin with Y, 174 with Q and 199 with Z. Q ends just two seven-letter words in the entire dictionary, and V ends one.

The endings are the other half of the story and they are very lopsided. S closes 11,036 words (33.53 percent), E closes 3,501, D closes 3,497, R closes 2,764 and G closes 2,263. Those five endings account for 23,061 words, 70.08 percent of the list. If you are building a word and you have no idea what it should end in, end it in S. If you are hooking alongside an existing letter, the most common endings to have ready are S, E, D, R and G.

Where the points sit

The average seven-letter word scores 11.82 points with standard English letter values. That is 1.69 points per tile, and it is the number to compare your opener against. Ten points for seven tiles is a poor opening; sixteen or more is a good one, before you count the 50-point bonus.

802 words score 20 points or more, 192 score 25 or more, 39 score 30 or more, and only four score 40 or more: PIZZAZZ, PAZZAZZ and BEZZAZZ on 45, and ZYZZYVA on 43. So when you set the tool to a minimum of 18, you get 1,523 words. Set it to 25 and you get 192. The list narrows fast once you ask it a specific question.

The most common single score is 10 points, with 4,744 words, closely followed by 11 points with 4,734 and 9 points with 4,513. The middle of the distribution is where a seven-letter word usually lands, which is exactly why the top of it matters so much: a double Z moves a word from the middle of the pack to somewhere no ordinary opponent can reach.

Repeats, isograms and the racks they produce

Two thirds of the list repeats a letter. 22,110 of the 32,909 seven-letter words, 67.19 percent, contain a letter more than once, and 1,980 contain a letter three or more times. Only 10,799 words, 32.81 percent, are isograms — all seven letters different.

The doubled letter is predictable, which makes this easy to study: E doubles in 5,226 words, S in 3,516, A in 2,778, I in 2,166, O in 1,961, R in 1,931, T in 1,595, N in 1,525, L in 1,419 and D in 1,029. Learn the top four and you cover most of the space.

For an opening this matters more than it does at any other length, because a rack and a word have to agree on their doubles. A rack of E, E, A, T, R, S, N can only make a seven-letter word that uses both Es, which is a much narrower field than the raw tile count suggests. The tool on this page handles it directly: type the letter twice in the include box and the count drops to the words that actually use both copies.

Using the list on the board

This page is the vocabulary; the Scrabble solver is the geometry. The solver takes your actual tiles and returns the words you can make right now, with hooks and bonus squares applied, which is what you need once the board matters more than the word.

A good order of work is this. First, type your rack into the include box, with a duplicate letter typed twice. If you want to hold a tile back, put it in the exclude box. Second, set the minimum score to match the board — anything from 10 on a blank square, 14 over a double-letter square, 18 over a triple-letter square. Third, sort by points and read the top of the list. Fourth, check each candidate against the board for a legal placement. If you are opening, you also want to look at what is left on your rack, and the Scrabble finder will show you the board position for each play.

If you are playing alone, the Scrabble solitaire version takes a single hand and works the same way. If you want the shorter material that makes bingos possible in the first place, the site's six-letter list is where most of those building blocks live, and the two-letter word list is where most of the actual board-clearing work happens.

One more use worth knowing. Because 9,424 of the words here are a six-letter word plus an S, this page doubles as a plural finder: find a six-letter play you like, add an S if you have one, and you have converted a 12-point word into a bingo plus the extra points the S adds on a double-letter square.

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.

It is heavily inflected, because English is: 55.87 percent of the entries end in S, ES, ED, ER or ING. It contains dialect, historical and technical forms, and forms that exist mainly so the game lexicons can accept them — 1,298 words, 3.94 percent of the list, end in a consonant, a consonant and then an S, which is the shape of a cluster plural like ABDUCTS, ABJECTS or ABSORBS.

The scores here are face values. 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 rather than the word. A seven-letter word that looks like 8 points on this page can be worth 80 on the right square, and a word worth 30 here can be worth 30 anywhere.

It is also not the official Scrabble tournament lexicon. The two lists overlap heavily but they are not identical, and for competitive play the official word list is the authority. This page tells you what exists, how long it is and what it is worth on a plain square; it cannot tell you which words a given board will accept.

Finally, a note on the tool. Because the collection holds 32,909 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. The counter is always exact.