6-letter words with I as the 2nd letter and L as the 4th letter

The fourth-slot L rarely works alone: 61 of the 149 matches put a second L in front of it, giving KILLED, FILLED, MILLER, WILLOW, PILLOW and VILLAS. Past tenses and plurals dominate the endings, with 83 matches closing on S, D or T. Twenty-five words sit in the common tier, so this is one of the friendlier patterns to guess from a half-filled grid.

What the L-heavy pattern holds

• 149 six-letter matches set an L in the fourth slot with an I ahead of it.
• 61 double the L, the largest single block in the set.
• Past tenses and plurals make up 83 matches, closing on S, D or T.
• Twenty-five of them count as common, and 109 have a definition.
• ZILLAH and BIFLEX tie at the top on 18 points each.

6-letter words with I as the 2nd letter and L as the 4th letter

L in fourth place is a tight constraint, so the same slot with other second letters runs much larger: A gives 250 matches, O gives 206 and E gives 167, while Y manages only 21. Slot four itself is equally crowded, with 260 matches when I holds it, 222 when E does and 187 when T does.

Sixty-one matches double the L instead of leaving it alone. KILLED, FILLED, MILLER, KILLER, PILLOW, WILLOW, PILLAR and VILLAS show how productive that -ILL- frame becomes, and it explains why so much of the list sounds like ordinary speech.

Why does -LET keep turning up?

S closes 31 matches, D closes 26 and T closes 26. The D group is almost entirely ordinary past tense: 25 of the 26 end in -ED, as KILLED, FILLED, BILLED, TITLED, DIALED, RIFLED and MISLED do.

The T group has a character of its own, because 19 of the 26 finish in -LET: PIGLET, GIBLET, BILLET, FILLET, MILLET, VIOLET, GIMLET, NIBLET, WIGLET and their kin. That makes the pattern a shortcut whenever a clue points at a small object.

Premium letters sit at the very top