Sources and limits
The word list
Every list and search uses ENABLE (Enhanced North American Benchmark LExicon), compiled by Alan Beale with Mendel Cooper around 1997–2000 as a free word list for word-game software. Its readme says the list “is placed in the Public Domain for anyone to use as they see fit” and is “free and freely available for any legal use” — you can read that readme in the copy kept by the Debian project: sources.debian.org/src/scowl/6-2/r/enable/README.
The file used here is enable1.txt from github.com/dolph/dictionary: 172,823 lowercase words, one per line, two to twenty-eight letters long. The readme describes an edition with 173,528 words; the difference is an edition difference that we have not traced.
What is left out
189 words are removed by a blocklist of slurs, sexual terms and strong profanity, applied to every page and every search, so 172,634 words remain. The blocklist is deliberately cautious, so a few words with innocent meanings (an animal name, an old spelling) are missing too. If you need the complete list, use the original file.
What the list does not have
ENABLE predates many words that game dictionaries added later. Two-letter words such as QI, ZA, OK and EW are not in it, and neither are newer words from the last two decades. It has no definitions and no information about how common a word is. It is not the official word list of any game: check unusual words in your game's own dictionary before relying on them.
The five-letter clue helper
Daily guessing games choose their answers from private lists of a few thousand common words. Those lists belong to the games' owners and are not used here. The helper checks all 8,606 five-letter words that remain after the blocklist, so it usually shows more candidates than the game could actually have as an answer, and its suggested guess is chosen to split those candidates evenly, not to guess the most likely answer.
How letter values are worked out
Each letter is worth points according to how much of the whole word list it makes up: the rarer the letter, the more it is worth. A letter that is 6% or more of all letters is worth 1, 3–6% is worth 2, 2–3% is 3, 1–2% is 4, 0.5–1% is 5, 0.25–0.5% is 8, and anything rarer is 10. A word's score is the sum of its letters. This is this site's own rule, not the scoring of any game.
| Letter | Share of all letters | Points |
|---|---|---|
| E | 11.51% | 1 |
| S | 9.52% | 1 |
| I | 9.01% | 1 |
| A | 7.57% | 1 |
| R | 7.07% | 1 |
| N | 6.85% | 1 |
| T | 6.68% | 1 |
| O | 6.59% | 1 |
| L | 5.31% | 2 |
| C | 4.09% | 2 |
| D | 3.38% | 2 |
| U | 3.27% | 2 |
| P | 2.94% | 3 |
| M | 2.84% | 3 |
| G | 2.70% | 3 |
| H | 2.32% | 3 |
| B | 1.84% | 4 |
| Y | 1.63% | 4 |
| F | 1.23% | 4 |
| V | 0.98% | 5 |
| K | 0.85% | 5 |
| W | 0.74% | 5 |
| Z | 0.47% | 8 |
| X | 0.29% | 8 |
| Q | 0.16% | 10 |
| J | 0.16% | 10 |
How the lists were chosen
A ready-made list exists when Google suggests its search phrase among the top ten for that kind of search, and the word list has at least five words for it. The measurements were made on 11 October 2026; see all lists.
Trademarks
Scrabble (Hasbro, Mattel), Words With Friends (Zynga) and Wordle (The New York Times Company) are trademarks of their owners and are mentioned only to describe the kinds of games these tools help with. This site is not affiliated with or endorsed by them.