5 letter words starting with D

What is in this list

This list holds 452 words, 0.3% 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 19th largest: “5 letter words with E” leads with 3,876 and “5 letter words ending in UMPY” has the fewest, 5. 5 words that would also fit were left out by this site's blocklist of slurs and explicit words.

Points and vowels

Using this site's letter values, the average word here scores 9.2 points (median 9); words of the same lengths across the whole list average 9.6, so this list runs 0.4 points leaner. The top scorers are DIZZY (23), DEWAX (17), DIVVY (17), DEOXY (16). Point for point, DIZZY earns the most per letter: 23 points over 5 letters, 4.6 each. D itself is worth 2 points here, so the score comes from the other letters.

Vowels (A, E, I, O, U) make up 34.1% of the letters, against 38% across the whole list. 23 words are more than half vowels. 1 word has none of them at all, leaning on Y instead — for example DRYLY. Compared with the whole dictionary, the letter most over-represented here is Y: 3.7% of the letters, against 1.6% overall.

Letter by letter

Position by position, the most likely letters are D in slot 1 (100%), O in slot 2 (21.2%), R in slot 3 (8.8%), E in slot 4 (20.8%), S in slot 5 (33.6%). 309 words use 5 different letters with none repeated (68.4%); the rest repeat at least one, and the most common double is LL (12 words). The most common endings are -LLY (5, as in DALLY), -ALS (4, as in DEALS), -KED (4, as in DEKED). 33.2% end in a single S — mostly plurals and verb forms of shorter words.

Word play in this list

The biggest anagram family here is DEISM, DIMES and DISME — 3 words from the same 5 letters. Altogether 40 sets of anagrams sit inside this list, covering 82 words. It contains 3 palindromes, read the same both ways: DEKED, DELED and DEWED. 19 words turn into another real word when spelled backwards — DEBUT becomes TUBED, DECAF becomes FACED, DECAL becomes LACED, DEDAL becomes LADED. DACHA is the longest word here that uses only one kind of vowel, ahead of DADAS.

37.2% of these words take an S on the end and stay a word (DACHA, DAGGA and DAMAN among them); after S, the most useful end letter is Y, which extends 19 words. At the front, A turns 3 words into new ones (DEEMS → ADEEMS); E turns 2 words into new ones (DUCES → EDUCES); I turns one word into a new one (DEALS → IDEALS).

Using this list

If the answer to a five-letter puzzle is known to be in this list, DARES is the guess that splits it most evenly: its colour patterns divide the words into 49 groups, the largest of which has 55 words left (4.8 bits of information). To narrow it further, open it in the pattern finder: the rule “starts with D, has 5 letters” is already filled in, and you can add a length, a fixed letter position or letters to leave out.