Words by Length: Every Word List from 2 to 15 Letters

Pick a length

Every list below is generated from the same master dictionary, so the counts are exact rather than rounded off. Start with the length you need and the tool will tell you how many words that is, how many of them repeat a letter, and how many carry no vowel at all.

Every length, side by side

The vowel share climbs as words get longer. At 2 letters only 50.0% of all letters are vowels, because short words have to carry their meaning on a consonant. By 15 letters it is 39.91%, because long words can hide a syllable in the middle and lean on the consonants around it. That single number explains more about English word games than any other statistic on this page.

Scrabble value climbs with length too, and not gently. A 2-letter word averages 4.06 points; a 15-letter word averages 22.95. Length is the simplest scoring rule in the game, and a length-specific list is therefore a scoring list as much as a word list.

Which length to use, and when

Different games want different lengths, and picking the wrong list is the most common reason a solver returns nothing useful.

• 4 and 5 letters for Boggle-style grids and for anything that hides words in a dense letter square. This is also the band where the everyday vocabulary is densest, so a grid built from a 4- or 5-letter list is the one most likely to contain a recognisable answer.
• 5 letters for Wordle and every one of its multi-board variants. The 5-letter list is the backbone of this site, and the variant-specific lists - the no-E words, the double-letter words and the vowel-free words - are carved out of it.
• 3 letters for word-search construction and for the connective tissue of word-connect games, where a three-letter word is often the bridge between two longer ones.
• 6 and 7 letters for Spelling Bee and for the long-form daily puzzles. A 7-letter list is mostly inflections, so a 7-letter list is a tool for elimination, not for guessing.
• 8 and above for word-search and crossword construction, where a long word is worth more per crossing.

Two useful numbers for narrow play: 4,465 of the 12,478 five-letter words repeat a letter, and 22,110 of the 32,909 seven-letter words do. A puzzle that has already shown you a doubled letter is a puzzle with a much smaller answer set than the raw count suggests, and the doubled-letter lists are where that filter is already applied for you.

The letters that run out first

Some letters cannot fill a long slot. Counting words that contain J, Q, X or Z at each length shows the squeeze clearly:

• 3 letters - 126 words contain J, Q, X or Z (9.8% of the list).
• 4 letters - 379 words contain J, Q, X or Z (6.9% of the list).
• 5 letters - 1,004 words contain J, Q, X or Z (8.0% of the list).
• 6 letters - 1,806 words contain J, Q, X or Z (8.2% of the list).
• 7 letters - 2,599 words contain J, Q, X or Z (7.9% of the list).
• 8 letters - 3,135 words contain J, Q, X or Z (7.8% of the list).
• 10 letters - 3,580 words contain J, Q, X or Z (10.1% of the list).

The same squeeze shows up at five letters in a sharper way. Q appears in only 104 of the 12,478 five-letter words - fewer than one in 1 in 120 - and X appears in 268. These are the letters that make a guess expensive and a board decisive, and the Wordle answer statistics page shows what happened when the real answer pool got the same treatment.

How to use a length-specific list

A length list is a filter, not a suggestion. The workflow that works is the same every time: fix the length, fix the letters you have seen, fix the letters you have ruled out, and read what is left. Each length list on this site supports that directly - you can exclude letters, require letters, sort by Scrabble weight and copy the result.

For a solver that works on any length at once, use the word finder. For building puzzles, the word search maker and the crossword puzzle maker both draw from the same dictionary.

What these lists are, and what they are not

One honest warning, because it changes how you should read every number above. These are full English dictionary lists, so they include inflections, compounds and archaic forms. A word like ABANDONEDLY is a real word and it is in the list; it is also never going to be the answer to a daily puzzle. That is why the pages separate the everyday vocabulary from the long tail, and why the published-answer pages - the answer archive and the lookup by puzzle number - exist: they are the filtered truth about what a puzzle actually picks.

Used together, the two kinds of list answer different questions. The dictionary answers "what words could fit this shape". The published answers answer "what did the puzzle actually pick". Most people need both, and the gap between them is where the interesting strategy lives.

How every length differs, letter by letter

The table below is the whole dictionary compressed into one view. For each length it shows how many words there are, which letter carries the most weight, which letters are scarcest, what share of the words repeat a letter, what share have no vowel at all, and the three highest-scoring words in the whole set.

Read the "repeat a letter" column downwards and you get the clearest single fact on this page. Two-letter words almost never repeat, because a doubled consonant in a two-letter word is basically impossible in English. Five-letter words cross a tenth of the list. By seven letters, more than two thirds of the dictionary repeats a letter, and by twelve letters the notion of a "rare" shape has disappeared entirely. The longer the word, the less shape tells you.

Read the "no vowel" column and you get the opposite trend, which is why vowel-free words are a curiosity at three and four letters and effectively vanish later. At two letters there are still 10 words with no vowel at all. At twelve letters there are only 0. English runs out of vowel-free words long before it runs out of words.

The commonest letter changes as words get longer

The three most common letters at each length:

This is a fact about suffixes rather than about vocabulary. English builds long words by adding endings, and the commonest endings are -ING, -ED, -ER and -ES. Those endings drag E, S and R up the frequency table as length grows. It is also why the letter E dominates every long-word list, and why a five-letter guess that does not include E is close to hopeless.

The practical version: if you are choosing a first guess at a long word, include E and S. If you are choosing a first guess at a short word, the balance is different, because a two- or three-letter word is too short for suffixes to have done their work yet.

How many vowels does a word of this length usually have?

The modal vowel count for each length, and how many words sit outside it:

Two vowels is the default for a five-letter word, which is exactly what the published answer set shows: 58% of the 1,994 real answers have precisely two vowels, and only eight have none. For longer words the modal count climbs to three, for the same suffix reason that pushed E and S up the letter table.

The rare letters, length by length

Here are the words at each length that carry the letters players fight over. These are the words that make a grid worth solving and a rack worth playing.

3-letter words with a rare letter

• Q - QAT, QIS, QUA, SUQ (4 words in total at this length)
• X - ZAX, ZEX, PYX, KEX, FAX (47 words in total at this length)
• Z - ZZZ, ZIZ, ZUZ, JIZ, ZAX (44 words in total at this length)
• J - JIZ, JAK, HAJ, JAW, JAY (34 words in total at this length)

4-letter words with a rare letter

• Q - QUIZ, WAQF, QOPH, QUAY, QUEY (22 words in total at this length)
• X - JAXY, JYNX, JEUX, JINX, FOXY (84 words in total at this length)
• Z - ZIZZ, ZZZS, JAZZ, JIZZ, FIZZ (140 words in total at this length)
• J - JAZZ, JIZZ, JAZY, HAJJ, JAXY (142 words in total at this length)

5-letter words with a rare letter

• Q - SQUIZ, QUAKY, QUACK, QUAFF, QUICK (104 words in total at this length)
• X - ZAXES, ZEXES, JAXIE, KYLIX, XEROX (267 words in total at this length)
• Z - PZAZZ, JAZZY, FEZZY, FIZZY, FUZZY (371 words in total at this length)
• J - JAZZY, HAJJI, JACKY, JIFFY, ZANJA (268 words in total at this length)

6-letter words with a rare letter

• Q - QUAZZY, QUEAZY, EXEQUY, QUACKY, QUARTZ (229 words in total at this length)
• X - EXEQUY, JAWBOX, PAXWAX, JYNXES, BANJAX (440 words in total at this length)
• Z - QUAZZY, BAZAZZ, BEZAZZ, BIZAZZ, PAZAZZ (686 words in total at this length)
• J - JAZZBO, JAZZED, JAZZER, JAZZES, JIZZES (474 words in total at this length)

7-letter words with a rare letter

• Q - QUIZZED, QUIZZER, QUIZZES, QUARTZY, SQUEEZY (398 words in total at this length)
• X - JUKEBOX, KICKBOX, ZOOTAXY, ASPHYXY, JAMBEUX (665 words in total at this length)
• Z - BEZZAZZ, PAZZAZZ, PIZZAZZ, ZYZZYVA, PIZAZZY (948 words in total at this length)
• J - JAZZILY, JACUZZI, JAZZBOS, JAZZMAN, JAZZMEN (629 words in total at this length)

Two patterns fall out of this. First, the count of rare-letter words collapses as length grows - there are far more four-letter words with a Q than there are seven-letter ones, because a seven-letter word with a Q has to be built around a genuinely unusual syllable. Second, the surviving rare-letter words are the ones you already know: they are proper nouns, foreign borrowings and the plainest everyday words in the language. A grid containing QUIZ is a solvable grid. A grid containing QUIZZLING is a puzzle about scrolling a dictionary.

If you want the same thing filtered for you, the word finder will take letters you type and return every matching word, rare-letter words included.

A worked example: narrowing a six-letter answer

Here is the whole method in one pass, using real numbers from the six-letter list. Suppose a puzzle has six letters, and your first guess confirmed two letters and eliminated one.

The six-letter list holds 22,157 words. Your two confirmed letters, whatever they are, are present in a large fraction of them. The letter you eliminated removes 14,772 of them outright, because a six-letter word without that letter is a genuinely different shape. What is left is a set small enough to read rather than to compute - and that is the whole trick. The six-letter list with the letter filters applied is a fast physical lookup; doing it by eye is not.

Three further refinements come straight from the tables above. If the puzzle has a doubled letter, the 11,795 six-letter words that repeat one are a much smaller pool. If it has no vowel at all, you are down to 22 words, and you can simply read them off. And if the commonest letter at that length is E, a guess that avoids E has already wasted part of your board.

None of this needs a paid tool. It needs the list, the filters, and the statistics, all of which are on this site.

What a length list cannot tell you

Every list on this site is a membership list, and membership is not the same as likelihood. A word is in the dictionary because English contains it, not because a puzzle is likely to use it. That distinction is the one thing a solver has to hold in mind, and it is worth being concrete about it.

Take the four-letter list. It contains 5,454 words, and a large share of them are inflections - verbs ending in -ED and -ER, plurals with an -S. SHEEP and SHEEPS are both in the list, and no daily puzzle will ever want SHEEPS. Equally, four-letter lists are dense with short function words like THAT, WITH, FROM and HAVE, which are real words that a puzzle would never pick either, because a four-letter answer that is a function word feels like a bug to the player.

So the filter that actually helps is not length. It is a filter on kind of word, and the good news is that the data on this site gives you a way to approximate it without any frequency list at all. Three rules cover most of it:

• Drop the function words. Words under four letters that are articles, prepositions and pronouns are almost never answers. The word finder and the length lists can both filter by letter, which is a crude but effective way to skip them.
• Prefer the base form. If a word has an -S, -ED or -ING twin in the list, the base form is the likelier answer.
• Watch the compound length. A long word that is two short words joined together - the pattern shared by ABANDONEDLY and COTTONCANDY - is a dictionary artefact much more often than it is a puzzle answer.

None of this needs a frequency list, and that is deliberate: a frequency list is a paid dataset, and everything on this site runs on data we can verify ourselves. The published answer set is the honest substitute for frequency data, because it is a real sample of what puzzles actually pick - 12,478 answers, 1,962 distinct words, and you can read the shape of it directly on the statistics page.

How we count, exactly

Every number on this page comes from one dictionary, read once, counted once. The word pool is the same one that powers our word finder and our five-letter list, so the counts agree with each other rather than being sourced from three different places and quietly disagreeing.

A word counts at its length if it is in that pool, if it contains only letters, and if it appears once. Punctuation, hyphens, accented characters and proper nouns that are not plain letter strings are left out. The vowel share is letters-that-are-vowels divided by total letters, not a count of words. The Scrabble averages use the standard English letter values - A1 through Z10 - and nothing else.

The published answer figures quoted on this page are a separate thing and they are verified against the official answer feed date by date. The two datasets are kept apart on purpose: one describes the whole English language, the other describes what a puzzle actually picked.

Why the middle lengths are the useful ones

Look at the counts again and you can see a curve: 124 two-letter words, 1,292 three-letter, 5,454 four-letter, 12,478 five-letter, 22,157 six-letter, 32,909 seven-letter, and then it keeps climbing to 40,727 at nine letters before falling away again as the words get long enough that English runs out of constructions.

The interesting part is the rate of change, not the peak. Going from three letters to four roughly quadruples the list. Going from four to five roughly doubles it again. Going from five to six does not double it - it adds 9,679 words - and from six to seven it adds 10,752. Each extra letter costs you more, and the cost accelerates.

That acceleration is the practical limit on any word game built on letters. A 4x4 Boggle grid offers sixteen letters, which is four words of four letters - a set small enough that a good solver can list it. A 5x5 grid offers twenty-five letters, which is five words of five, and that is the point where the list stops being small enough to memorise and starts needing a real filter.

For construction rather than solving, the same curve works in reverse: a longer word means fewer words needed to fill the same space, and a shorter word means more of them. If you are filling a word-search grid, choose the length that gives you the number of words you actually want to hide, not the length that happens to have the most options.