Find the perfect word

A word that wins at your Scrabble club can get challenged off the board in a phone app. Each result shows which dictionaries accept it, plus its tile score and how common it is. Browse by length, narrow by letter, or open the Wordle solver.

Which dictionary should you play by?

• North American Scrabble: NWL2023, with 196,601 words, is the list most clubs and apps in the US and Canada follow.
• Scrabble elsewhere: Collins is the standard, and its 267,752 words are the biggest of the three lists.
• Phone word apps: ENABLE is the open list many are built on, with 172,823 words.
• Wordle: 2,315 words are answers, and the solver filters them by your greens, yellows and greys.
• Bingos: use all seven tiles for a 50-point bonus, and look at the 7-letter and 8-letter lists first.

Why is a word valid in one game but not another?

Because the three dictionaries only partly overlap. Just 167,976 words appear in all of them, and 80,467 words are accepted by Collins but by neither NWL2023 nor ENABLE.

Even the American-leaning lists disagree. NWL2023 holds 196,601 words and ENABLE 172,823, so a phone app built on ENABLE rejects plays that a North American tournament accepts.

Short words show the gap fastest. QI and ZA score 11 each and pass NWL2023 and Collins but not ENABLE, while ZO and CH work only in Collins.

Newer entries split the lists as well. OK and EW are valid in NWL2023 but appear in neither Collins nor ENABLE, which surprises players who assume the newest list is a superset of the rest.

Treat that as the main limit of any word list. A Collins-only play is legal at a London club and a bad bet in Chicago, so check your game's word list before you risk a challenge.

Which letters show up most in Wordle answers?

E leads: it appears in 1,056 of the 2,315 answers, about 46%, with A in 909 and R in 837. O follows in 673 answers and T in 667.

Doubles matter more than most players expect. 749 answers repeat a letter, in words like GEESE, LLAMA and SASSY, so a guess with five different letters will not always find them.

Endings are lopsided too. Of all 12,789 five-letter words, 3,898 end in S, yet only 36 answers do. Your last tile is far more likely to be E (424 answers) or Y (364).

Vowels are not guaranteed. 13 answers contain no A, E, I, O or U, and all of them lean on Y, including CRYPT, TRYST and GLYPH.

Wordle also accepts far more guesses than answers: 12,728 of the 12,789 five-letter words are playable, so most guesses can never be the solution.

A Wordle opener that earns its place

How do you find the right word fast?

1. Choose a length from the lists by length. Five letters holds 12,789 words and nine letters holds 41,930.
2. Narrow by first or last letter, such as 5-letter words starting with S, which has 1,547 entries.
3. Open the Finder when you know some letters and positions but not the whole word.
4. Read the dictionary badges and the tile score before you play, then open the word page for its meaning.
5. For Wordle, enter each guess in the solver so greens, yellows and greys trim the list of 2,315 answers.

How does Word Puzzle Answers order its results?

By real-world frequency, so words you know come first. Of the 281,752 words, 140,142 carry a frequency rank. HOUSE sits at 174th, CRANE at 7,899th and SLATE at 9,252nd.

Familiar words cluster at the top. ABOUT ranks 43rd and OTHER 71st, so the opening rows of any five-letter list read like normal English before the oddities start.

Frequency measures familiarity, not value. ZAX ranks 153,965th, yet it is valid in all three dictionaries and scores 19 points. When points matter more than recognition, sort by the score instead.

Each word page shows whether the word is valid, what it means and what it scores, so a list result is one tap from a full answer.

Why learn two-letter words and Q without U?

Short words let you play beside tiles already on the board. 126 two-letter words are valid across the lists, with NWL2023 accepting 107 and ENABLE 96. XU scores 9 and all three accept it.

Q is the awkward tile. Only 80 words use Q without U, and QAT scores 12, so learn that one before the longer ones.

Heavy tiles reward the same habit. QUIZ scores 22 and ZAX scores 19, both valid in all three dictionaries, and each can turn a quiet board into a lead.

How big is each word length?

Nine letters is the biggest group with 41,930 words, just ahead of eight letters at 41,364. Five-letter words, the Wordle size, total 12,789.

The 7-letter and 8-letter lists hold 75,152 words between them, which is where bingo hunting happens. Start from the word list hub and pick your length.

Raw size and familiarity do not match. Seven letters holds the most common words, 3,332, while five letters has 2,584, so a shorter list is not always the easier one to read.

Where to start with the word finder