Five-letter words aren’t random strings of letters. English spelling favours particular arrangements of vowels and consonants, a limited set of endings, and certain letters in certain positions. Knowing these patterns helps you make a sensible guess when you only have part of a word, and it helps you write better searches in the word finder.
All figures below are measured across the 11,454 five-letter words in the finder’s word list (ENABLE plus dictionary words from SCOWL). It includes plurals and less common words, so it’s broader than the answer list of any single puzzle game.
Consonant and vowel shapes
Write each word as C for consonant and V for vowel (A, E, I, O, U; Y is counted as a consonant here) and a few shapes cover most of the list. The most common by far alternates consonant, vowel, consonant, vowel, consonant.
| Shape | Words | Share | Examples |
|---|---|---|---|
| CVCVC | 2,882 | 25% | robin, lemon, camel |
| CVCCC | 1,845 | 16% | first, night, burnt |
| CCVCC | 1,266 | 11% | black, stamp, crust |
| CVCCV | 1,028 | 9.0% | table, horse, dance |
| CVVCC | 996 | 8.7% | beach, rough, paint |
| VCCVC | 551 | 4.8% | after, orbit, under |
| CCVVC | 511 | 4.5% | steam, bread, float |
| CCVCV | 485 | 4.2% | grape, stone, price |
| VCVCC | 302 | 2.6% | event, alarm, along |
Two practical takeaways. Most five-letter words have one or two vowels, so if you’ve found two vowels, the rest are probably consonants. And a vowel in second place (the C V _ _ _ shapes) is very common. If you know the first letter is a consonant, testing a vowel next is a good bet.
A small group has no A, E, I, O or U at all (42 words in the list). Almost all of them use Y as a vowel (39 of the 42), as in crypt, lynch and nymph.
Common endings
The last two letters are the most predictable part of a five-letter word. Plural S alone ends 3,462 words in the list (30%), which is why many puzzle games exclude simple plurals from their answers. These are the most frequent two-letter endings:
| Ending | Words | Share |
|---|---|---|
| -es | 648 | 5.7% |
| -ed | 473 | 4.1% |
| -er | 416 | 3.6% |
| -ts | 347 | 3.0% |
| -as | 251 | 2.2% |
| -ks | 239 | 2.1% |
| -ls | 224 | 2.0% |
| -ns | 195 | 1.7% |
| -ds | 184 | 1.6% |
| -os | 166 | 1.4% |
Many -ED, -ER and -ES words are inflected forms of four-letter words (past tenses, comparatives and plurals), while endings such as -TY and -CH more often belong to base words. If an answer is unlikely to be an inflected form, focusing on those endings is a useful shortcut. The finder’s “Ends with” filter takes one or more letters, so ends with CH is a single search.
Double letters
1,575 words (14%) contain the same letter twice in a row. Double letters are easy to overlook, because people tend to guess five different letters. The most common pairs are:
- oo: 293 words
- ee: 267 words
- ll: 203 words
- tt: 107 words
- ss: 96 words
- ff: 95 words
- rr: 86 words
- nn: 75 words
Pairs usually sit in the middle of the word (third and fourth letters, as in HELLO or GREEN) and almost never at the very start. To search for doubles, type the letter twice in “Must include”, for example OO, or put both copies in a pattern such as ??LL?.
Which letters favour which positions
Letter frequency changes a lot by position. S is the most common first letter in this list, and also the most common last letter because of plurals. Vowels dominate the second position, and E is by far the most common fourth letter, thanks to endings like -ED, -ER and -ES. The table shows the five most common letters in each position.
| Position | Most common letters (words) |
|---|---|
| 1st | s (1,394), c (825), b (781), p (777), t (736) |
| 2nd | a (1,977), o (1,794), e (1,434), i (1,253), u (1,036) |
| 3rd | a (1,103), r (1,070), i (937), o (899), n (855) |
| 4th | e (2,124), a (956), t (798), i (782), l (699) |
| 5th | s (3,462), e (1,283), y (1,175), d (730), t (640) |
Putting patterns to work
Patterns are for deciding what to try next, not for ruling words out. A clue always beats a probability. When you’re stuck, try the most likely shape for the letters you have, test an ending that fits, and check for a double letter before giving up. The clue-by-clue method shows how to combine this with the finder, and the five-letter word lists let you browse by first and last letter.