5-Letter Words: Common Words by First and Last Letter

Five-letter words have become the most searched word length on the internet, thanks almost entirely to Wordle. They're also a sweet spot in Scrabble: long enough to reach a double-word square from a single opening, short enough to fit almost anywhere.

Our dictionary contains 12,653 five-letter words. Most are obscure, though. Only about 2,800 are words you'd see in everyday writing, and those are the ones most likely to be Wordle answers. This page lists common five-letter words by first letter and by last letter, so you can find candidates fast without wading through thousands of rare words.

Five-letter words by first letter

Each row shows common, everyday words. They're sorted roughly from most to least common, so the first few in each row are the most likely to come up in a word puzzle.

Five-letter words starting with X are rare. XENON (a gas) and XYLEM (plant tissue that carries water) are the ones most people know.

Five-letter words by last letter

Wordle players often know the final letter before anything else. These are common words grouped by their ending.

Notice how many common words end in S, E, Y, T and D. That reflects English itself: plurals end in S, many nouns and verbs end in a silent E, and adjectives often end in Y. In our analysis of about 2,800 common five-letter words, S was the most frequent final letter by a wide margin.

Plurals and Wordle

One important detail: the official Wordle answer list largely avoids simple plurals ending in S (such as GAMES or YEARS). They're accepted as guesses but rarely the answer. So if you're solving Wordle and suspect an S ending, consider whether the word could be a non-plural, like CLASS, PRESS or FOCUS.

Where the letters fall

Across our list of common five-letter words, the most common letter in each position was:

This is useful in two ways. In Wordle, it tells you where to test letters. In Scrabble, it helps you see how to arrange a rack: a consonant first, a vowel second and an S, E or Y at the end is the most typical shape.

For opening-word strategy, see our Wordle starting words analysis.

Finding five-letter words with filters

Our word finder lets you combine filters:

• Starts with + length 5: every five-letter word beginning with your letters.
• Ends with + length 5: useful when you know the final letter.
• Contains: requires certain letters anywhere in the word.

For Scrabble racks, type your letters into the unscrambler and look at the five-letter results.

Related lists

• 4-letter words
• 6-letter words
• 7-letter bingo words