How to find five-letter words faster

Five-letter word games reward two different skills. One is vocabulary: knowing enough words to come up with candidates. The other is strategy: choosing guesses that tell you as much as possible, and reading the clues carefully. Vocabulary takes years to build, but strategy is something you can improve this week.

We wanted specific numbers, so we counted letters in about 2,300 common five-letter English words. The words come from SCOWL, the same public word database Word Rush Vault uses to check guesses. We left out simple plurals like "cats" and "boxes," since the hidden words in word games are rarely plurals. The numbers below come from that count.

Which letters matter most

Some letters show up far more often than others. This table shows how many of the words contain each of the most common letters at least once:

Letter	Share of words containing it
E	52%
A	39%
R	36%
O	28%
I	28%
T	27%
L	27%
S	26%
D	24%
N	23%

At the other end, J and Q each appear in only about 1% of the words, and X and Z in about 2%.

E is in more than half of all five-letter words, so it pays to find out early whether the answer has an E. And the consonants R, T, L, S, D, and N are nearly as common as the vowels O and I. A good opening guess needs a mix of both.

Choosing an opening guess

A useful way to judge an opener is to ask how many of its letters you'd expect to find in the answer, green or gold, on average. You get that by adding up the shares in the table for each letter in the word.

By that measure, the strongest openers in our count were words like IRATE, AROSE, ARISE, RAISE, STARE, and LATER, which all find about 1.8 letters on average. For comparison:

Opener	Letters found on average
IRATE	1.82
AROSE	1.81
STARE	1.80
SLATE	1.71
CRANE	1.68
ADIEU	1.62
AUDIO	1.37

Vowel-heavy openers like ADIEU and AUDIO are popular, but they score worse than you'd expect. They tell you about the vowels. Most words have only one or two vowels, though, and you learn nothing about the consonants that make up most of the word.

Only about 7% of the words share no letters at all with AROSE, so almost every game that starts with AROSE gives you at least one letter to work with.

A two-guess opening

Some players like to open with two fixed guesses that share no letters, which covers ten different letters before they start solving. In our count, the best-covering pair was IDEAL followed by SNORT. Together they find about 3.1 letters on average, and only about half a percent of words contain none of their letters.

The catch is scoring. In Word Rush Vault, solving in two guesses is worth 3,500 base points and solving in three is worth 2,500, so a fixed second guess can cost you when your first guess already gave you a lot. A good compromise is to use a fixed second guess only when your first guess found one letter or none.

Reading the clues

After each guess, every letter gets a color:

• Green means the letter is in the word, in that spot.
• Gold means the letter is in the word, but somewhere else.
• Gray means the letter isn't in the word.

The most common mistake is failing to use all of this in the next guess. Keep green letters in place. Move gold letters to a different spot, since you now know where they aren't. Don't reuse gray letters unless you're deliberately spending a guess to test new ones.

Repeated letters need extra care. If you guess a word with two Es and one is gold or green while the other is gray, the answer has exactly one E. If both light up, it has two.

Think about positions

Letters aren't spread evenly across a word. In our count:

• The most common first letters were S (15% of words), C (9%), and B (7%).
• The most common last letters were E (17%), D (14%), and Y (13%), followed by T and R.
• About 7% of the words end in -ER. Common consonant pairs at the start include ST, SH, CH, SP, CR, and GR, and at the end CK, NG, CH, and NT.

A few patterns are strong enough to use directly. When a word contains a Y, the Y is the last letter 85% of the time. About a third of the words with both an R and an E end in -ER. And in words that contain an E, the E is the last letter about a third of the time. So if you've found a gold Y, try it at the end first, and if you've found a gold R and E, try an -ER ending early.

Don't forget double letters

About 31% of the words in our count repeat at least one letter, like APPLE or JOLLY. When you've run out of ideas, it's often because the answer repeats a letter you've already found. Ask yourself whether any green or gold letter could appear twice.

Break out of a word family

One situation catches almost everyone. You know four letters, and several words fit. Say the answer ends in -IGHT. It could be FIGHT, LIGHT, MIGHT, NIGHT, RIGHT, SIGHT, TIGHT, or more. Guessing them one at a time could take every guess you have left.

The better move is a guess that tests several first letters at once. FILMS, for example, tests F, L, M, and S in a single guess. If one of them lights up, you know the answer. If none do, you're down to a few words such as NIGHT, RIGHT, and TIGHT, and one more test guess or a hint settles it. Spending a guess you know is wrong to narrow the field is usually faster than guessing candidates one at a time.

Hints, time, and streaks in Word Rush Vault

Word Rush Vault adds a few twists of its own:

• Hints. Reveal tells you a letter that's in the answer, and Cull grays out up to three keyboard letters that aren't. Reveal is most useful early, when you have few letters, and Cull in a word-family situation like the one above, where eliminating letters narrows the candidates quickly. The Daily Vault gives you two hints per run, Endless gives one, and Practice gives three.
• Time. There's no time limit, but solving quickly earns a speed bonus: 1,000 points under 30 seconds, 500 under 60, and 250 under 90. The bonus is smaller than the difference between guess counts, so never rush a guess to save time. A two-guess solve at 70 seconds scores more than a five-guess solve at 25.
• Streaks. Solving words back to back builds a streak multiplier, and missing a word drops it back a tier. When your streak is high and you're down to your last guess or two, a hint is worth far more than the risk of a miss.

A routine to try

1. Open with a strong, varied word like AROSE or STARE.
2. If it finds almost nothing, follow with a word of five new letters.
3. Put green letters in place, move gold letters, and drop gray ones.
4. Think about common first and last letters, and whether a letter might repeat.
5. When several words fit, spend a guess testing their differences.

Give this routine a week on the Daily Vault and keep an eye on your average guesses per word. The Word Rush Vault guide covers the modes and scoring in full.