4 letter words with Q

What is in this list

This list holds 16 words, under 0.1% of the 172,634 words this site keeps from the ENABLE word list. Every word here has 4 letters, and they average 4 letters by construction — so the interesting differences are in which letters they use. Of the 16 lists in this group it is the smallest; “6 letter words with A” is the largest with 6,569, 411 times as many.

Points and vowels

Using this site's letter values, the average word here scores 15.4 points (median 15); words of the same lengths across the whole list average 8, so this list runs 7.3 points richer. The top scorers are QUIZ (21), QOPH (17), QUAY (17), QUEY (17). Point for point, QUIZ earns the most per letter: 21 points over 4 letters, 5.3 each. Q itself is worth 10 points here, which is why so many of these words outscore their length.

Vowels (A, E, I, O, U) make up 48.4% of the letters, against 38% across the whole list. 2 words are more than half vowels: AQUA and QUAI.

How the words are built

Q opens 14 words (87.5%), closes 0 and sits inside the other 2. 12.5% end in a single S — mostly plurals and verb forms of shorter words.

Word play in this list

No two words in this list are anagrams of each other.

81.3% of these words take an S on the end and stay a word (AQUA, QAID and QOPH among them); after S, the most useful end letter is E, which extends 2 words. At the front, E turns 2 words into new ones (QUID → EQUID); S turns 2 words into new ones (QUAD → SQUAD).

Using this list

The full list is short enough to read in one go: AQUA, QAID, QATS, QOPH, QUAD, QUAG, QUAI, QUAY, QUEY, QUID, QUIN, QUIP, QUIT, QUIZ, QUOD and SUQS. Ranked by points it runs from QUIZ (21) down to QATS (13), a spread of 8 points.