How Many 5 Letter Words Are There? Counts, Letters and Stats

Ask ten dictionaries how many five-letter words there are and you will get ten different answers. The number depends on which words you count: everyday words only, or every obscure term that is valid in Scrabble. So we counted our own list, word by word. Here is what we found.

The short answer

Our word list contains 8,636 five-letter words. That total comes from ENABLE, a public-domain word list used by many word games, so it includes plenty of rare words such as AALII and ZOWIE alongside everyday ones.

Most people only ever use a small part of that list:

• 3,155 are common English words you would recognise in everyday writing.
• 2,120 are the kind of words that make good Wordle answers: common words that are not simple plurals or past-tense forms.
• The rest are valid in word games but rarely seen outside a dictionary.

So while there are thousands of five-letter words, the pool of realistic Wordle answers is only about a quarter of the full list.

How five-letter words compare with other lengths

Five letters is a sweet spot: long enough for plenty of variety, short enough to guess in six tries. Here is how it compares with the lengths next to it in our list:

The number of possible words roughly doubles with every extra letter, which is one reason six- and seven-letter word puzzles feel so much harder.

Which letters start the most five-letter words?

S is the clear winner. 1,056 five-letter words start with S, about one in eight of the whole list and far ahead of any other letter. After S come C, B, P and T.

At the other end, very few five-letter words start with X (13), Z (51) or Q (53). Browse the full lists: 5 letter words starting with X, starting with Z and starting with Q.

Which letters end the most five-letter words?

The last letter tells a different story. 2,695 five-letter words end in S, nearly a third of the list, because so many of them are plurals such as BOOKS and CARDS. Next come E (931), Y (906), D (582) and R (523).

This matters for Wordle. The game rarely uses simple plurals as answers, so although S is the most common last letter in the dictionary, it is a much weaker guess for the final square than E or Y. Only 2 five-letter words in our list end in Q, and 2 end in V.

Vowels in five-letter words

Most five-letter words have two vowels. Only 36 have none at all; almost all of those use Y in place of a vowel, as in LYMPH, CRYPT and NYMPH. At the other extreme, just 21 words pack four vowels into five letters, including ADIEU, AUDIO and QUEUE.

Repeated and double letters

Repeated letters are more common than most players expect. 2,971 five-letter words (34%) use at least one letter twice, such as LEVEL, GEESE and ALLOW. Of those, 1,145 have the repeat side by side, as in APPLE, BOOKS and SPELL.

That is why a green or yellow tile never tells you how many times a letter appears. Our guide to repeated letters in Wordle explains how the colors work, and our Wordle solver can filter for words with or without repeats.

What this means for your next game

• Start with S in mind. S begins more five-letter words than any other letter, so an S-first guess tests a lot of possible answers.
• End with E or Y, not S. Wordle answers rarely end in a plural S.
• Expect two vowels. Nearly six in ten words have exactly two.
• Remember repeats. One word in three repeats a letter.

Want to see the letters that matter most? Read our breakdown of the most common letters in 5 letter words, or jump straight to the best Wordle starting words.

Try it yourself

Here are the most popular five-letter words in our list. Switch on Scrabble values or sort by score to explore them: