5 letter words ending in A

What is in this list

This list holds 356 words, 0.2% of the 172,634 words this site keeps from the ENABLE word list. Every word here has 5 letters, and they average 5 letters by construction — so the interesting differences are in which letters they use. Of the 36 lists in this group it is the 22th largest: “5 letter words with E” leads with 3,876 and “5 letter words ending in UMPY” has the fewest, 5.

Points and vowels

Using this site's letter values, the average word here scores 9.1 points (median 9); words of the same lengths across the whole list average 9.6, so this list runs 0.5 points leaner. The top scorers are HUZZA (22), PIZZA (21), TAZZA (19), ZANZA (19). Point for point, HUZZA earns the most per letter: 22 points over 5 letters, 4.4 each. A itself is worth 1 point here, so the score comes from the other letters.

Vowels (A, E, I, O, U) make up 46.4% of the letters, against 38% across the whole list. 121 words are more than half vowels. Compared with the whole dictionary, the letter most over-represented here is M: 4.9% of the letters, against 2.8% overall.

Letter by letter

Position by position, the most likely letters are S in slot 1 (10.1%), A in slot 2 (20.5%), N in slot 3 (12.1%), I in slot 4 (11.8%), A in slot 5 (100%). 165 words use 5 different letters with none repeated (46.3%); the rest repeat at least one, and the most common double is LL (9 words). The most common three-letter openings are MAN- (3, as in MANIA), ABA- (2, as in ABACA), ARE- (2, as in ARECA).

Word play in this list

The biggest anagram family here is AMNIA, ANIMA and MANIA — 3 words from the same 5 letters. Altogether 11 sets of anagrams sit inside this list, covering 25 words. It contains 1 palindrome, read the same both ways: ALULA. 4 words turn into another real word when spelled backwards — REDIA becomes AIDER, REGNA becomes ANGER, SIRRA becomes ARRIS, STRIA becomes AIRTS. ABACA is the longest word here that uses only one kind of vowel, ahead of ABAKA.

72.2% of these words take an S on the end and stay a word (ABACA, ABAKA and ABOMA among them); after S, the most useful end letter is E, which extends 60 words. At the front, O turns 2 words into new ones (EDEMA → OEDEMA); B turns one word into a new one (REGMA → BREGMA); C turns one word into a new one (HOLLA → CHOLLA).

Using this list

If the answer to a five-letter puzzle is known to be in this list, MARIA is the guess that splits it most evenly: its colour patterns divide the words into 45 groups, the largest of which has 95 words left (4.3 bits of information). To narrow it further, open it in the pattern finder: the rule “ends in A, has 5 letters” is already filled in, and you can add a length, a fixed letter position or letters to leave out.