The 360 Series
Ranked word lists where the number is an honest cut and the method is on the page.
What The 360 Series Is
Every page in this series answers one question with a ranked list of 360 things, and explains the method used to rank them. The number is this site's own, and it comes with a rule we hold ourselves to: 360 is only used where 360 is an honest cut of a much larger pool.
That rule matters more than it sounds. It is easy to write a page called "360 best words" and pad a list of 210 to reach the headline, or to slap the number on a set whose real size is fixed and different. Both are lies of a small and boring kind, and both are exactly what a search engine is trying to filter out. So where a real count is fixed we publish the real count. There are exactly 124 two letter words and exactly 75 words with a Q and no U, and those pages say so.
The Series So Far
360 Top Scrabble Words
The 360 highest scoring words that fit on a rack, drawn from 75,005 words of two to seven letters and ranked by bare tile value. Scores run from 45 down to 24. The useful part is not the words at the top, which need tiles you will almost never draw, but the shape of the list: 214 of the 360 are seven letters long, which tells you that length beats rarity.
360 Best Wordle Starting Words
360 five letter openers ranked by how much information each one buys, drawn from the 8,079 five letter words that use five different letters. The method is a coverage score, and it is explained on the page rather than asserted, so you can disagree with it.
360 Richest Letter Sets
The 360 letter combinations that make the most different words, from the 21,871 sets in English that make more than one. The richest makes 13. This is the most useful page of the three, because it shows why the common one point tiles everybody complains about are the most valuable ones in the bag.
How The Numbers Are Produced
Every figure on every page in this series is computed from the same dictionary the tools on this site run on, which holds 269,870 words. The pages are rebuilt from that dictionary rather than typed by hand, so a number on a page and a result from a tool cannot drift apart. If the word list changes, the lists change with it.
Scoring uses each game's own tile values. Scrabble and Wordfeud do not agree: Wordfeud rates J at 10 against Scrabble's 8, B, C, F and P at 4 against 3, G at 3 against 2, and U at 2 against 1. Ranking a Wordfeud rack with Scrabble values produces the wrong order, so we do not do it. The Wordfeud Helper uses the Wordfeud table and the Scrabble Word Finder uses Scrabble's.
Why Lists At All
A tool tells you the answer for your letters right now. A list tells you what exists, which is a different and slower kind of useful. You cannot memorise the output of an unscrambler, but you can absorb the shape of a ranked list and carry it to the table, and that is what turns a person who uses a tool into a player who does not need one.
The lists here are built to be read rather than scraped. Each one leads with the method and the limitations before it gets to the words, because a ranked list without a stated method is just an assertion.
What The Dictionary Does Not Contain
Every list here inherits the limits of the word list underneath it, so those limits belong on the page rather than buried.
No proper nouns. No names of people, places, companies or characters. Word games exclude them too, so for our purposes this matches.
No abbreviations or acronyms unless they have become words in their own right.
No hyphenated or multi-word forms. The list holds single unbroken words only.
Very little recent vocabulary. Standard word lists are revised slowly, so words that entered common use in the last few years are frequently missing from all of them. A word everybody you know uses can still be absent.
There is also no single English word list. North American Scrabble uses one official list, the rest of the world uses a larger one, and mobile games each picked their own at different times. A word that is legal in one is refused in another. When a game rejects something from one of these lists, that is a dictionary difference rather than a mistake here, and the game's list wins.
What Would Make A Fourth Page
A list earns a place in this series if it passes three tests. It has to answer a question somebody actually has. It has to be rankable by a method we can state plainly and you can argue with. And 360 has to be an honest cut of the pool rather than a number we reached by padding.
That third test rules out more ideas than the first two. Plenty of interesting word sets are simply not 360 items long, and the right response to that is to publish the real count, not to stretch. It is the reason this series is three pages rather than twenty.
Want an answer rather than a list?
The Word Unscrambler takes your letters and returns every word they make. Check Dictionary settles whether one particular word is valid and what it scores.