5-Letter Word Data: What 8,605 Words Reveal About Wordle
By The PuzzlePage editors
We analyzed every five-letter word in the public-domain ENABLE dictionary — 8,605 of them — to answer the questions word-game players argue about. Which letters actually matter, where they sit, and whether the popular opening words deserve their reputation.
Letter-frequency analysis of five-letter words is well-trodden ground, and we are not claiming to have discovered it. Two things here are worth your attention anyway. First, the denominator: most published analyses use a curated puzzle answer list of a few thousand words, while this one uses the full 8,605-word lexicon, which moves several of the numbers. Second, the coverage ranking in section 2 — scoring words by how much of the corpus their distinct letters touch — is a measure we have not seen published elsewhere, and it puts a different word in first place than the usual suspects. Everything is computed at build time, the method is written out below, and the whole dataset is downloadable so you can check us.
168,551
words in the corpus
8,605
five-letter words
46.4%
contain the letter S
1. Position matters more than frequency
The most-cited word-game advice is to open with common letters. That is only half the story: a letter's value depends heavily on where it tends to sit. S is the single most common letter overall, but it is concentrated almost entirely at the end — 31.3% of five-letter words end in S, while only 12.2% start with one.
| Position | Most common letter | Share of words |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | s | 12.2% |
| 2 | a | 17.1% |
| 3 | a | 9.9% |
| 4 | e | 19.8% |
| 5 | s | 31.3% |
2. The highest-coverage opening words
A good opener maximizes how much of the answer space a single guess can rule in or out. We scored every five-letter word with no repeated letters by summing the corpus presence rates of its five distinct letters — the share of words each letter appears in. The winner is arose, narrowly ahead of two words players already favor.
| Rank | Word | Coverage score |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | arose | 192.1 |
| 2 | arise | 190.9 |
| 3 | raise | 190.9 |
| 4 | serai | 190.9 |
| 5 | arles | 188.0 |
| 6 | earls | 188.0 |
| 7 | lares | 188.0 |
| 8 | laser | 188.0 |
| 9 | lears | 188.0 |
| 10 | rales | 188.0 |
Coverage is a measure of breadth, not a guarantee: a word that touches many common letters learns a lot on average but can still miss badly on a specific answer. Test any of these in the Wordle solver to watch the candidate list collapse in real time.
3. Letter frequency, ranked
The share of five-letter words containing each letter at least once. The gap between the top and bottom is enormous: S appears in 46.4% of words, while Q appears in under one percent.
Rarest letters: Q (0.8%), J (2.0%), X (2.3%), Z (2.5%), V (5.3%). Opening with any of these wastes a guess in almost every game.
4. Almost every word has two vowels
59.0% of five-letter words contain exactly two vowels— the single most useful structural fact in word games. It means a four-vowel opener like ADIEU spends three guesses' worth of information on a pattern that occurs in a fraction of words, while consonants do more work than their reputation suggests.
| Vowels | Words | Share |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | 34 | 0.4% |
| 1 | 2,680 | 31.1% |
| 2 | 5,073 | 59.0% |
| 3 | 797 | 9.3% |
| 4 | 21 | 0.2% |
5. How words end
Final letters are the least evenly distributed position in the language. The top eight endings account for the large majority of all five-letter words.
6. The highest-scoring five-letter words
Base Scrabble score, before any board multipliers. Z and J carry the value, and doubling them is how a five-letter word beats most seven-letter plays.
Methodology
Corpus. The ENABLE word list — a public-domain English dictionary of 168,551 words (2–15 letters, alphabetic only) that Words With Friends uses as its base list. It is close to, but not identical with, the NASPA and Collins tournament lists.
Presence rate.The share of words containing a letter at least once. A word with a doubled letter counts once, so the figure answers “how often will I see this letter”, not “how many times does it occur”.
Positional frequency. For each position, the share of words carrying a given letter in exactly that slot.
Coverage score.For words with five distinct letters, the sum of those letters' presence rates. It measures the breadth of a single guess, and deliberately excludes words with repeated letters, which spend a slot on information they already have.
Reproducibility. Every number is computed at build time by src/lib/word-stats.ts from the dictionary shipped at /dictionaries/enable-2-15.txt. Both are public — you can recompute any figure here yourself.
Version and license. This is dataset v1.0.0, released under CC0 1.0 Universal (public domain dedication) (CC0 1.0) — no rights reserved, no permission needed, commercial use fine. Cite it as: PuzzlePage (2026). English word statistics (ENABLE corpus), v1.0.0. https://www.puzzlepage.app/word-data
Download the data. The full dataset for 4-, 5- and 6-letter words is available as JSON at /word-data/dataset.json (full study) and /word-data/dataset.csv (the letter-frequency table, spreadsheet-ready) — letter presence rates, positional frequency for all 26 letters, coverage rankings, vowel distribution, endings, and scoring extremes.
Custom cuts. Journalists and researchers wanting a slice we have not published — a different word length, a specific letter pair, a filtered sub-corpus — are welcome to ask via the contact page. The computation is a few lines against the corpus, so this is a genuine offer, not a formality.
Teaching with it, or recommending it to readers? Link it— it's free either way, and no attribution beyond the link is required.
Link (HTML)
<a href="https://www.puzzlepage.app/word-data">5-Letter Word Data Study — PuzzlePage</a>Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best Wordle starting word according to the data?
By letter coverage — the share of five-letter words touched by a guess's distinct letters — AROSE ranks first, followed by ARISE and RAISE. All three use five different letters drawn from the most frequent pool, which is what makes an opener informative.
What is the most common letter in 5-letter words?
S, appearing in 46.4% of all 8,605 five-letter words, followed by E at 45.0% and A at 40.5%.
How many 5-letter words end in S?
2,693 of them — 31.3% of all five-letter words, by far the most common ending. Most are plurals, which is why many puzzle games exclude them from their answer lists even though they are valid guesses.
Where does this data come from?
The ENABLE word list, a public-domain English dictionary of about 168,000 words that Words With Friends uses as its base list. Every figure on this page is computed directly from it at build time; the methodology section describes exactly how each number is derived.
Put the data to work