7-letter words with T as the 1st letter and L as the 4th letter

The pattern is T _ _ L _ _ _: the fourth tile is L, with five positions left open. Familiar matches include TELLING, TABLETS, TRILOGY, TOILETS, and TROLLEY; only 9 matches rank among the top 25,000 English words by frequency. The count includes words accepted by at least one of Collins, NWL2023, or ENABLE.

7-letter words with T first and L fourth: key facts

• 128 words match the fixed T _ _ L _ _ _ pattern.
• Only 9 matches are among the top 25,000 English words by frequency.
• 101 of the 128 words have a definition.
• The average word score is 9.4 points.

Which matching words score the most?

TWELFTH, TOOLBOX, TAILZIE, and TUILZIE tie at 16 points each. TOOLBOX and TWELFTH are familiar rack options; TAILZIE and TUILZIE are less everyday vocabulary, so check your game's word list before relying on them.

THALWEG, TAXLESS, and TOYLIKE each score 14 points. Their valuable letters raise the total, but the fourth tile still has to be L. Don't move that fixed letter while testing a high-value tile in another slot.

For a quick rack check, write T and L in their fixed positions before arranging the other tiles. TELLING, TALLIES, and TROLLEY make the pattern easy to see: each has three letters between the opening T and the fourth-position L, then three more letters to finish.

What endings and nearby patterns should you try?

S is the most frequent final letter among these matches: 45 words end in S, while 20 end in E. TABLETS and TALLIES demonstrate the S ending; test it when your rack supports a plural or another inflected form.

Changing the first letter to S produces 267 seven-letter matches with L fourth, more than twice the T-pattern's 128. Keep T fixed, though, and moving L to the fourth position of a six-letter word gives 70 matches. A broad search for T words will miss the clue's most important constraint.

The 128 matches are not 128 equally familiar choices: only 9 meet our common-word cutoff, and 101 have a definition.