5-letter words with I as the 2nd letter and L as the 5th letter

Every match ends in L, and 17 of the 40 finish on -AL, including the familiar set FINAL, RIVAL, TIDAL, VIRAL, and VITAL. Ten matches appear on the Wordle answer list, a quarter of the group. The average score is only 8.6 because I is worth a single point, so ZIZEL at 23 stands far above the rest.

Ten answers among 40 matches

• 40 tournament-dictionary matches put I in slot two and L in slot five.
• A quarter of them, 10 words, are Wordle answers.
• Seventeen matches end in -AL, and five of those count as common English words.
• ZIZEL tops the scoring at 23 points, nine clear of PIXEL and SIZEL.
• P opens seven matches; S and V open five each.

Which -AL words will players already know?

Seventeen of the 40 matches close on -AL, and five of them rank among the 25,000 most frequent English words: FINAL, RIVAL, TIDAL, VIRAL, and VITAL. Each pairs a short stem with the same two-letter ending, so the group is easy to hold in memory as a block.

The other endings are smaller: -EL covers nine matches, -UL five, -IL four, -OL three, and -YL two. FINAL, VITAL, and RIVAL also double as Wordle answers.

A scoring shortcut

5-letter words with I as the 2nd letter and L as the 5th letter

Ten of the 40 matches are Wordle answers: CIVIL, FINAL, LIBEL, PIXEL, RIVAL, TIDAL, VIGIL, VINYL, VIRAL, and VITAL. Each is also a legal guess, and no other match in the set reaches 12 points except the three Z words.

The average score sits at 8.6, low for a list with so many answers, because I is a 1-point tile. For 5-letter words with I as the 2nd letter and L as the 5th letter, the opening letter is the real filter: P leads with seven words, while S and V manage five each.