5-letter words with W as the 1st letter and E as the 2nd letter

Fifty-eight five-letter words open with WE, and the endings lean hard on S: 26 matches close that way. Most of the list is plain everyday vocabulary, from WEEKS and WELLS to WEIRD and WELSH. Nine matches are Wordle answers and 12 rank among the 25,000 most common words.

WE??? at a glance

• Fifty-eight matches, all opening with WE.
• S closes 26 of them, Y and E nine each.
• Nine are Wordle answers; twelve are common words.
• WEIZE tops the scores at 17, with WEXED on 16.
• Twenty matches live only in Collins.
• WE- is the fourth-commonest W opening, behind WA-, WI- and WH-.

Which endings the WE- words take

S closes 26 matches, more than the next three endings combined: Y and E take nine each, H five, and D and T three apiece.

That S-heavy tail makes the frame read like a plural machine. WEARS, WEEKS, WEEDS, WELDS and WEIRS are all plural or third-person forms, and only WEBBY and WENNY break the run with a final Y.

The Collins-only X and Z outliers

WEIZE tops the list at 17 points and WEXED follows on 16, with WEXES on 15. All three are Collins-only, so a North American player never sees the top two scores.

WEBBY reaches 15 on its doubled B and is the one high scorer available everywhere. Below that the list flattens, because most matches carry only plain tiles and settle between 8 and 12.

W also carries a hidden cost. The letter is worth 4, so a WE- guess spends a solid tile early without promising a big total unless an X or Z turns up later in the word.

Where the answer list and the common list diverge