5 letter words with U and E

What is in this list

This list holds 456 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 18th 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 9.6 points (median 9); words of the same lengths across the whole list average 9.6, so this list scores the same as the dictionary. The top scorers are JUKED (20), JUKES (19), QUAKE (19), FIQUE (18). Point for point, JUKED earns the most per letter: 20 points over 5 letters, 4 each. U and E together are worth 3 points here.

Vowels (A, E, I, O, U) make up 47.5% of the letters, against 38% across the whole list. 164 words are more than half vowels. Compared with the whole dictionary, the letter most over-represented here is D: 4.7% of the letters, against 3.4% overall.

Letter by letter

In 363 of them U comes before E; in the other 93, E comes first. 100 words put the two side by side, like ADIEU, AGUES, ARGUE and BLUED. Position by position, the most likely letters are U in slot 1 (11.6%), U in slot 2 (45.6%), U in slot 3 (26.3%), E in slot 4 (42.3%), E in slot 5 (36.8%). 370 words use 5 different letters with none repeated (81.1%); the rest repeat at least one, and the most common double is EE (8 words). The most common three-letter openings are QUE- (9, as in QUEAN), CUR- (7, as in CURED), BLU- (6, as in BLUED). The most common endings are -USE (16, as in ABUSE), -UES (11, as in AGUES), -UTE (10, as in ACUTE). 21.1% end in a single S — mostly plurals and verb forms of shorter words.

Word play in this list

The biggest anagram family here is CRUET, CURET, CUTER, ERUCT, RECUT and TRUCE — 6 words from the same 5 letters. Altogether 83 sets of anagrams sit inside this list, covering 200 words. 8 words turn into another real word when spelled backwards — DEBUT becomes TUBED, MURES becomes SERUM, REBUS becomes SUBER, REBUT becomes TUBER.

56.8% of these words take an S on the end and stay a word (ABUSE, ACUTE and ADIEU among them); after S, the most useful end letter is D, which extends 86 words. At the front, P turns 17 words into new ones (ILEUM → PILEUM); S turns 16 words into new ones (AUGER → SAUGER); A turns 12 words into new ones (BUSED → ABUSED).

Using this list

If the answer to a five-letter puzzle is known to be in this list, LURES is the guess that splits it most evenly: its colour patterns divide the words into 62 groups, the largest of which has 56 words left (5.1 bits of information). To narrow it further, open it in the pattern finder: the rule “contains U and E, has 5 letters” is already filled in, and you can add a length, a fixed letter position or letters to leave out.