5 Letter Word Finder

Find 5 letter words with these letters

There are two ways to search, depending on what you know.

• You know some letters and where they go (Wordle, crosswords): use Wordle clues. Green boxes are for letters in the right spot, yellow boxes for letters that are in the word but not in that spot, and the grey field for letters that aren't in the word. To find 5 letter words containing a letter without knowing where it goes, put it in "Must contain".
• You have a set of letters to use (Scrabble, letter puzzles, "5 letter words from the following letters"): use Use these letters. Type up to 15 letters and you'll see every 5 letter word you can make using only those letters.

For example, the letters TRAECS make 9 common 5 letter words: trace, react, scare, stare, crest, caste, cater and crate. That's the quickest way to find 5 letter words using these letters when you're holding tiles or solving a word puzzle.

How to unscramble a five-letter word

Type the scrambled letters into Use these letters. Every 5 letter word that uses exactly those letters appears in the list, highest Scrabble score first. If you have a blank tile, type ? for it.

Many five-letter words are anagrams of each other, which is why unscrambling can have more than one answer. The letters TEALP unscramble to plate, leapt, petal, pleat, palet, lepta, pelta and tepal, of which plate and petal are in everyday use. Other common sets with several answers include react, cater, crate, carte and trace and steal, slate, stale and least.

Using the 5 letter word finder for Wordle

After each Wordle guess, copy the colors into the finder: green letters into the green box for their spot, yellow letters into the yellow box for the spot where you tried them, and grey letters into the grey field. The list then shows only the 5 letter words that still fit, with the most common words first. When fewer than 400 common words are left, the finder also suggests the next guess that rules out the most answers.

Here's a real example from our word list. The answer is GHOST, and you open with RAISE, the starting word that performed best in our test.

Guess 1: RAISE S is green, and the rest are grey. 9 common words still fit.

Guess 2: FLUSH S is green and H is yellow, and the rest are grey. 1 common words still fit: ghost.

Guess 3: GHOST Solved.

Each guess after the first was the remaining word that split the possible answers most evenly. That's the same calculation the finder runs when it shows "best next guesses". For a page made just for this, see the Wordle solver.

The most common letters in 5 letter words

Across the 1,787 common five letter words, the letters that appear most often are E (in 48% of words), A (in 41% of words), R (in 37% of words), O (in 30% of words), T (in 30% of words) and I (in 28% of words). That's why good opening guesses lean on E, A, R, O, T, S and L: each one has a high chance of showing up.

Position matters as much as frequency. S starts 16% of common 5 letter words, more than any other letter, while E ends 19% of them and Y ends 13%. Vowels sit mostly in the second and third spots. The table shows the top three letters for each position.

How many 5 letter words are there?

Our list has 12,570 valid 5 letter words. Of those, 1,787 are common everyday words, and 3,563 are plurals or -s forms. The rest are real but rarer words, the kind that are accepted in Scrabble but that most people never use.

You'll see different totals on other sites because every dictionary and word game uses its own list. Scrabble's official lists include thousands of obscure words, while Wordle's answers are everyday words chosen by an editor. That's why we split every list into "common" and "all valid" words, and why every number on this site comes from the same list.

Patterns worth knowing

• Vowels: a common 5 letter word has 1.8 vowels on average. 29% have just one, like which, first and think.
• Double letters: 14% of common words have a double letter, like still, three, small and class. If a yellow letter won't fit anywhere, try it twice.
• No vowels: a few words have no A, E, I, O or U at all, because Y does the job: lynch, myths, psych and synth.
• Four vowels: audio, queue and louie pack in four vowels, which makes them popular (but not the best) Wordle openers.

Best 5 letter words for Scrabble

The highest-scoring common 5 letter words are jazzy (33), fuzzy (29), dizzy (27), pizza (25) and quick (20), before any bonus squares. Counting every valid word, pzazz (34), jazzy (33) and fuzzy (29) score the most. Words with J, Q, X or Z are worth learning, since those letters are worth 8 to 10 points each.

Use Use these letters with the tiles on your rack to see every 5 letter word you can play, sorted by score.