5-letter words with Y as the 2nd letter

With Y fixed in position two, the first letter gives you a quick way to narrow the choices: S leads with 30 entries, followed by L and T. The ending is even more lopsided: 103 words finish in S. Familiar options sit alongside tougher tournament vocabulary, so the pattern is broader than everyday play suggests.

At a glance: counts, endings, and score

• The tournament-list total is 269 words; 197 have definitions.
• Only 27 entries fall in the common-word group.
• S is the most frequent first letter, with 30 words.
• S closes 103 entries; D and E each close 28.
• ZYMIC tops the Scrabble scoring list at 21 points.

How many 5-letter words have Y in the second position?

There are 269 tournament-listed matches for this pattern. Everyday examples include TYPES, LYING, DYING, CYCLE, CYBER, SYRUP, and NYLON; less familiar entries such as ZYMIC and KYLIX show how far the word-game lists extend beyond common vocabulary.

Dictionary coverage differs: 263 entries appear in Collins, 181 in NWL2023, and 165 in ENABLE. Those totals overlap, so don’t add them together. The common-word count is 27, a small slice of the full set; check your game’s word list before relying on an unfamiliar entry.

Wordle matches and high-scoring choices

The pattern matches 23 Wordle answers and 268 allowed guesses. That makes a fixed second-letter Y compatible with both answer and guess lists, but the matching totals are not interchangeable. TYPES and CYCLE are recognizable examples, though nothing here identifies which individual words belong to the answer set.

For Scrabble, ZYMIC scores 21 points, while KYLIX and ZYMES each score 19 before any board bonuses. GYOZA, ZYGON, and HYRAX score 18. The expert move is to bank those high-value letters early and fall back on a familiar word when a scorer looks obscure.

The ending pattern can also trim a search fast: 103 entries end in S, compared with 28 each ending in D or E. For a clue with Y in slot two, use the final letter as a second filter rather than scanning all 269 matches. These 5-letter words with Y as the 2nd letter include many plurals, but not every S-ending option is one.