Word Finder & 5-Letter Word Finder

How to use the word finder

The Word Finder lists every English word that fits what you already know about it: how long it is, which letters sit in which spot, which letters it contains, and which letters it doesn’t. It searches about 179,000 words and shows the common ones first. It is made for 5-letter word games and crosswords, and it works for any length from 2 to 15 letters.

1. Pick the word length. It starts on 5 letters; tap another length, or open the menu for every length and for Any length.
2. Right spot (green). There is one box per letter of the word. Type each letter you are sure of into the box for its position.
3. In the word, wrong spot (yellow). Type the letters the word contains. If you also know where they are not, tick “I know which spots they are not in” and type each letter under that spot.
4. Not in the word (gray). Type every letter you have ruled out.
5. The list updates as you type, with common words first and in darker text. Tap a word to see what it means, tick “Common words only” to hide the rare ones, or copy the whole list.

5-letter word finder: a worked example

Say the hidden word is plant and your first guess is stare. The game colors the guess like this: stare. Here is what to type, and what is left:

1. stare Green: A in box 3. Yellow: T (not in spot 2). Gray: S, R, E. That leaves 25 words, 8 of them common: adapt, await, chant, giant, loath, plant, thank, twang.
2. chant Green: A, N and T in boxes 3, 4 and 5. Yellow: T (not in spot 2). Gray: S, R, E, C, H. That leaves 5 words, 2 of them common: giant, plant.

After the first guess the finder suggests chant as a good next guess, because it tests the letters most of the remaining words share. That second guess leaves only giant and plant among common words. If you only type the yellow letter and skip its spot, the first step leaves 26 words instead of 25, so the spots are worth entering while the list is still long.

Repeated letters. When a guess has the same letter twice, a game can color one copy and gray out the other. Guess speed when the word is abide and you get speed: one E is yellow, the other gray. Enter E as yellow and as gray. The finder reads that as “exactly one E” and keeps abide in the list.

Crossword solver: find words with missing letters

For a crossword, type what you have into the Pattern field with a question mark (or an underscore) for every empty square. The pattern sets the word length for you and fills the letter boxes, so you can keep narrowing the list with the other fields.

Words that start with, end with or contain letters

Set the length to Any length to search the whole list at once, grouped by word length. Starts with and Ends with take one letter or several, and Contains looks for letters in a row. You can combine them: words that start with UN and end in LY give 338 results (unduly, unruly, uneasily, unevenly…), and 365 words contain a double Z (buzz, fizz, fuzz, jazz, dizzy, fizzy…). The rare letters are where a list helps most:

5-letter words by starting letter

The list has 8,791 five-letter words, and 3,466 of them are common, everyday words. S starts the most (1,059) and X the fewest (13). To see every word for a letter, type it into box 1 or into Starts with.

5-letter words by ending

The same count for the endings people look up most, from single letters to -ER and -GHT:

5-letter words with the most vowels, and with none

No five-letter word in the list is made of vowels only. 21 have four vowels: the common ones are audio, eerie, queue, and the less common ones are aalii, adieu, aecia, aerie, aioli, aquae, areae, aurae, aurei, cooee, looie, louie, miaou, oidia, oorie, ourie, uraei, zoeae. At the other end, 36 have no A, E, I, O or U at all and lean on Y instead, such as crypt, cysts, dryly, hymns, lymph, myths, nymph, psych, slyly, and less common words like shyly, wryly, flyby, glyph, myrrh, sylph, tryst, stymy.

In between, here are five-letter words by the vowel in the middle (letter 3):

The most common letters in 5-letter words

Counting the 3,466 common five-letter words, S appears in 50% of them, followed by E (48%), A (37%), R (32%), O (28%), L (27%), T (26%), I (26%). Where a letter tends to sit matters as much: 35% of these words end in S, most of them plurals and verb forms such as books and makes.

A first guess tells you the most when it is made of five different letters that many words share. Scored that way, the top first guesses among everyday words are arose, laser, rates, stare, tears, arise.

How many words are there of each length?

Word list and privacy

The finder uses the same list as our other word tools: the public-domain ENABLE word list combined with the SCOWL English word lists, with slurs and profanity left out. It includes plurals and verb forms such as tables and jumped. Every word game keeps its own list, so a rare word shown here may not be accepted everywhere. Definitions come from WordNet (Princeton University) and our own dictionary. The search runs in your browser: the letters you type are never sent anywhere.

Have a rack of letters and no pattern? The Word Unscrambler starts from the letters you hold and finds every word they can make. More word tools: make your own puzzle with the Word Search Maker, find rhymes with the Rhyming Words finder, get practice words from the Random Word Generator, or play Hangman.