6-letter words with C as the 1st letter and U as the 5th letter

The pattern is C _ _ _ U _, leaving three positions open between the fixed letters and one after U. Familiar options such as campus, census, and citrus sit beside less common entries like cirque and cinque. Fourteen words meet the common-word cutoff, while the full set draws on tournament dictionaries with different coverage.

The pattern at a glance

• 86 tournament-dictionary words match C _ _ _ U _.
• 14 entries fall within the common-word group.
• S is the most frequent final letter: 42 words end in S.
• 75 matches have definitions; 11 do not have one here.
• Collins includes 84 matches, compared with 72 in NWL2023 and 68 in ENABLE.

6-letter words with C as the 1st letter and U as the 5th letter

Campus, census, circus, chorus, corpus, and citrus are recognizable examples of the pattern. Cheque and clique show how much the middle letters can change even though C and U stay locked into place. The large S-ending group includes words such as campus, census, and circus.

The 14 common entries make up only part of the 86-word set, so a familiar-word shortlist will miss many valid matches. Dictionary totals overlap rather than add together: Collins has 84, NWL2023 has 72, and ENABLE has 68. A word accepted by multiple lists is counted once in the combined total.

Which matches score well in Scrabble?

Chequy leads the high-scoring examples at 23 points, with cheque and cliquy each scoring 20. Clique, cirque, cinque, casque, claque, calque, and caique each score 17. The standout pattern is the Q: it raises these scores sharply, but the words themselves are less familiar than campus or chorus.

Its less common entries are better suited to a word-game rack than an everyday vocabulary list. Dictionary coverage varies across Collins, NWL2023, and ENABLE, so check your game's word list before playing an unfamiliar choice.