How are these word lists ordered?

Every list is ranked by commonness — how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English — and alphabetically within each band. So the words you already know sit at the top, and the specialist tail is at the bottom rather than scattered through the middle.

Do the lists show every matching word?

Each list stores at most 2,000 words. Where a list is bigger than that, the page says so and names the true total, and what you see is the 2,000 most common matches rather than an arbitrary slice.

What counts as a word here?

The lists cover the 83,253 single words in the corpus. The 64,225 multi-word phrases and compounds are browsable by letter but are left out of the pattern lists, because "words starting with T" is not a question about "table tennis".

Every list, one page

Word lists

AltF Lexicon publishes 545 word lists over 83,253 single words: 26 by starting letter, 14 by length, 271 by length and starting letter together, 88 by ending and 146 by the letters a word contains. Every list is ranked by how often the word appears in everyday English, and every one of them is linked below.

545
Word lists: 83,253
Single words indexed: 2–15
Letters covered: 2,000
Rows stored per list

26 lists

Words by starting letter

The A–Z, with the number of single words each letter carries. S is more than sixty times the size of X, which is the sort of thing you only see when the counts sit on the tiles.

14 lists

Words by length

Two letters to fifteen. The distribution peaks at eight — English has more eight-letter words than words of any other length, and the curve falls away sharply either side of it.

271 lists

Words by length and starting letter

The word-game grid. Pick a letter, then the length you need — the number under each tile is how many words match.

88 lists

Words by ending

The suffixes that carry enough words to be worth a page of their own, largest first. Several are families — -ion, -tion and -ation each get their own list because each is a different question.

146 lists

Words containing a letter or pair

Anywhere in the word, not just at the start or end. Useful for crosswords and for anagram-shaped questions, where the letter you know is stuck in the middle.

Single letters

Letter pairs

About these lists

How are these word lists ordered?: Every list is ranked by commonness — how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English — and alphabetically within each band. So the words you already know sit at the top, and the specialist tail is at the bottom rather than scattered through the middle.
Do the lists show every matching word?: Each list stores at most 2,000 words. Where a list is bigger than that, the page says so and names the true total, and what you see is the 2,000 most common matches rather than an arbitrary slice.
What counts as a word here?: The lists cover the 83,253 single words in the corpus. The 64,225 multi-word phrases and compounds are browsable by letter but are left out of the pattern lists, because "words starting with T" is not a question about "table tennis".
How many word lists are there?: 545 — 26 by starting letter, 14 by length, 271 by length and letter together, 88 by ending and 146 by the letters a word contains. Every one of them is linked from this page.

Word lists are computed from Princeton University’s WordNet; commonness is measured against a corpus of everyday English. Full sources and licences.

Look up a single word instead

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