How Many 5-Letter Words Are There in English?
There are 8,602 five-letter words in our 168,352-word game dictionary. Only 2,666 of them are common in everyday English. The rest are valid in word games but rarely used, like AALII, a Hawaiian shrub, or old spellings and technical terms.
Key facts
- 8,602 valid five-letter words; 2,666 are common in everyday English.
- 31% of all five-letter words end in S.
- More five-letter words start with S than with any other letter: 1,049 of them.
- Five-letter words make up about 5% of the full word list.
Why the answer depends on the dictionary
No dictionary contains every English word, and word game lists include many words that most people never use. Our count uses ENABLE, a public-domain word list made for word games, plus a few newer accepted words such as QI and ZA. Official tournament dictionaries are a little larger, and a big desk dictionary that includes rare and technical words would be larger still.
To decide which words are common, we used word frequency data from wordfreq, which measures how often each word appears across books, news, Wikipedia, film subtitles and the web. A word counts as common if it appears about once per million words or more.
Five-letter words by first letter
| First letter | All valid words | Common words |
|---|---|---|
| S | 1,049 | 381 |
| C | 661 | 222 |
| B | 585 | 196 |
| P | 560 | 168 |
| T | 546 | 183 |
| A | 497 | 132 |
| D | 453 | 124 |
| M | 444 | 144 |
S leads by a long way, partly because so many words start with clusters like SH, ST, SP, SC and SL. At the other end, X, Q and Z start only a handful of five-letter words.
How many words of other lengths are there?
Five-letter words are far from the most numerous. The most common length in our list is eight letters, with 28,397 words. You can see the full breakdown in how many words there are of each length.
Where to find them
- The full list of 5-letter words, common words first, with points.
- Lists by first letter, such as 5-letter words starting with S, and by last letter, such as 5-letter words ending in E.
- The Wordle helper, which filters all of them by your clues.
Sources
- Our own count over the ENABLE word list.
- Word frequencies: wordfreq by Robyn Speer (CC BY-SA 4.0).
