Every number in a 269,823 word dictionary

What Is Being Counted

Everything below is counted from the word list the solvers on this site check against, at the moment this page was built, so the numbers and the tool cannot disagree. The list holds 269,823 words between two and fifteen letters, made of 2,458,067 letters in total, which is an average of 9.11 letters per word.

It is a Collins style list rather than the shorter list used in United States and Canadian club play. Three quick ways to tell: it has 124 two letter words where the American NWL list has 107, it accepts CWTCH and GRRRL, and it runs to 269,823 entries where the ENABLE list runs to about 173,000. If you play in a club under American rules, a handful of the words here will not be accepted at your table. If you play Words With Friends, Wordscapes or any of the phone games, this is the right list.

You are free to quote any figure on this page. There is a ready made citation at the bottom.

How Long Words Are

Word length does not taper off from short to long. It rises to a peak at 9 letters, where there are 41,139 words, and falls away on both sides. Two letter words, the ones every board game player memorises first, are the rarest of all at 124, which is 0.046 percent of the dictionary.

That peak is why a seven tile rack feels the way it does. 33,186 words are exactly seven letters long, so the bingo you are hunting for exists far more often than it feels like it does. What is scarce is not the word, it is the rack.

How Words Begin

The opening letter is the most lopsided number in the whole list. S opens 30,766 words. X opens 305. That is a ratio of 101 to 1 between the commonest first letter and the rarest, in a language that gives both of them one square on a keyboard.

This is the practical reason a rack built around an X or a Z feels stuck while a rack of common letters feels loose. It is not that the rare tiles are worth more, it is that there are fewer places for them to go.

Letter Frequency Against The Tile Bag

Here is the fact worth taking to a game. The Scrabble tile bag was worked out in the 1930s by Alfred Butts, who counted letter frequencies on the front page of the New York Times, and the language has been counted a great deal more carefully since. Compare how often a letter appears across all 2,458,067 letters in this dictionary with how often it appears in the 98 lettered tiles.

S is the mistake. S makes up 9.62 percent of the letters in the dictionary, almost as much as E at 11.29 percent, and the bag gives it 4 tiles against E's 12. That single gap is why an S is the most valuable one point tile on the board and why experienced players will pass up eight points rather than break one up.

Vowels, And Doing Without Them

178 words contain no A, E, I, O or U. Drop Y as well and only 31 survive, which is 0.0115 percent of the dictionary. This is the list worth knowing by heart, because a rack of six consonants is otherwise a turn thrown away.

At the other end, 3,416 words use all five vowels at least once, and the shortest of them are seven letters: DOULEIA, EULOGIA, MIAOUED, MOINEAU, SEQUOIA. The longest unbroken run of vowels in any word is 6, in EUOUAES, a plainsong cadence that is six vowels and nothing else.

82,364 words avoid the letter E entirely, which is 30.5 percent of the list, in a language where E is the commonest letter there is.

The Q Problem

Q is the tile that ends turns. 1,360 words begin with it, and 75 words in the entire dictionary use a Q with no U behind it. Those 75 are the whole reason a Q is playable at all when the U is gone.

The full set, with scores, is on words with Q and no U.

How Common Anagrams Are

Anagrams are far denser than most players expect. 52,184 words, 19.3 percent of the dictionary, share their letters with at least one other word. They fall into 21,864 groups.

The largest single group is 13 words built from the same 5 letters: ARETS, ASTER, EARST, RATES, REAST, RESAT, STARE, STEAR, STRAE, TARES, TASER, TEARS, TERAS. Those letters are the five commonest in the language, which is exactly why they rearrange so many ways, and it is the reason a rack of common letters is worth holding rather than dumping.

What Scores Most

The highest scoring word in the list before any premium square is RAZZAMATAZZES at 51 points in Scrabble. The same word tops Words With Friends at 52 points. Neither will ever be played, because holding those tiles at once is close to impossible. The useful version of this number is per length.

Two letters and eleven points, from QI, is the best rate of return on the board and the single most useful thing on this page for a real game.

The Shape Of Words

77,292 words become another word when you add an S on the end, which is 28.6 percent of the list. That is what makes an S worth more than its one point: it is not a letter, it is a move.

63,026 words, 23.4 percent, contain a double letter. 50,694 words, 18.8 percent, never repeat a letter at all. The longest of those run to 15 letters: DERMATOGLYPHICS, UNCOPYRIGHTABLE, which use 15 different letters each and not one of them twice.

146 words of three letters or more read the same backwards. The longest is ROTAVATOR.

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