5-letter words with O as the 2nd letter and A as the 4th letter

With O fixed in slot two and A in slot four, the pattern is _ O _ A _. Familiar hits include TODAY, LOCAL, WOMAN, TOTAL and ROYAL, alongside less common tournament entries. The set has a clear shape: S leads as an opening letter, while S is even more common at the end.

The pattern at a glance

• There are 175 matching words across the tournament dictionaries.
• The pattern includes 22 Wordle answers and 174 allowed guesses.
• Only 20 matches are among the commonest English words, about one in nine.
• S is the most frequent ending, with 50 words; L follows with 36 and N with 23.
• S starts 18 words, just ahead of C with 17 and T with 16.

5-letter words with O as the 2nd letter and A as the 4th letter

TODAY and TOTAL make the pattern easy to spot in everyday vocabulary. LOCAL, VOCAL and FOCAL share the same final three letters, while ROYAL, LOYAL, POLAR and CORAL show how much the first and last letters can vary.

The final letter is a strong next clue: half of the matches ending in S, L or N end in S. For a comparison, changing the fourth letter from A to E produces 436 matches, so this A-pattern is a much narrower search.

How should you use this pattern in word games?

For Wordle, keep the 22 answer matches separate from the 174 allowed guesses; a legal guess is not necessarily an answer. Try familiar candidates such as TODAY or WOMAN only when their other letters fit your clues.

For Scrabble, TOPAZ and ROJAK each score 16 points before board bonuses. They are less familiar than LOCAL or TOTAL, so check your game's word list once: Collins includes 170 matches, compared with 128 in NWL2023 and 110 in ENABLE.