Five-Letter Words

How many five-letter words are there, which letters do they use most, and what shapes do they take? This page answers those questions from the 11,454 words in our list and links to complete lists by letter.

What counts as a five-letter word?

Simply, a word spelled with exactly five letters from A to Z: no spaces, hyphens, apostrophes or accented characters. What’s less simple is deciding which words count as words at all. This site combines the ENABLE list, a public-domain list compiled for word games, with dictionary words from SCOWL. It includes plurals (BOOKS), verb forms (TAKEN), and a fair number of rare words alongside everyday ones like HOUSE and PLANT. Proper nouns aren’t included.

Five letters is a sweet spot for word puzzles. It’s long enough for thousands of possibilities but short enough to reason about letter by letter, which is why so many daily word games use it.

How the finder works with this list

The five letter word finder checks every word in this list against your clues: a pattern such as A??LE, letters the word must include, letters to exclude, and letters it starts or ends with. It runs in your browser, so results update as you type. The step-by-step guide explains each field.

Five-letter words by the numbers

Vowels per word

Counting A, E, I, O and U (not Y), almost every five-letter word has one or two vowels. Words with none usually rely on Y instead.

Vowels	Words	Share
0	42	0.4%
1	3,413	30%
2	6,851	60%
3	1,122	9.8%
4	26	0.2%

Most and least common letters

Share of five-letter words that contain each letter at least once. The most common are S (46%), E (44%), A (41%), R (30%), O (30%). The rarest are Q (97 words), J (243 words), X (251 words), Z (341 words).

46%

44%

41%

30%

28%

25%

24%

22%

18%

17%

15%

13%

12%

11%

7.7%

7.6%

5.3%

3.0%

2.2%

2.1%

0.8%

Common patterns

A few patterns come up again and again, and they’re worth checking when you’re stuck:

Blends at the start. ST-, SH-, SP-, CR-, BR- and TR- all begin long lists. If the first letter is a consonant and the second is too, it is most often R, L or H.
Predictable endings. -ER, -ED, -LY, -TY, -CH, -SH and silent -E cover a large share of words.
Double letters. OO, EE, LL, SS and TT are the most common, usually in the middle of the word.
Consonant–vowel alternation. The single most common shape is consonant, vowel, consonant, vowel, consonant, as in ROBIN or LEMON.

Five-letter word patterns covers these in depth, with frequency tables.

How to search by letters

Match the kind of clue to the right field. Letters in a known position go in the pattern. Letters you know are present somewhere go in “Must include”. Letters you’ve ruled out go in “Exclude”. For a letter that appears twice, type it twice. For the full method, including how to handle a letter that appears once, read how to find five-letter words.

Examples of word patterns

Each example runs against the full list. Select one to open it in the finder and refine it.

Search	Matches	Examples
S???E Starts with S, ends with a (often silent) E	169	sable, sabre, sadhe, saice, salle
??AI? The AI vowel pair in the middle, as in TRAIN	57	again, amain, apaid, avail, await
?OO?? Double O in second and third place	191	boobs, booby, boody, booed, boogy
Ends with IGHT The -IGHT family	13	bight, dight, eight, fight, hight
Starts SH, ends Y A blend at the start, Y at the end	7	shady, shaky, shaly, shily, shiny
Q without U The rare exceptions to QU	10	coreq, faqir, qadis, qaids, qanat

Five-letter words by first letter

Full lists grouped by their first two letters, each with a short note on how words with that letter usually begin. X is left out because only a handful of five-letter words start with it.

Five-letter words by last letter

Lists for the most useful final letters. S is left out because most of its thousands of entries are plurals, which the finder handles better.

Five-letter words with rare letters

Rare letters narrow a search dramatically. These lists group words by where the letter appears.