The Most Common Letter Patterns in English Words (Data From 193,822 Words)

Rather than repeat generic advice about “common letters,” we ran the numbers directly on the same NWL2023 dictionary our solver uses — every word four letters or longer, 193,822 entries in total. Here’s what’s actually most common, with real counts.

Most Frequent Letters Overall

Counting every letter across all 193,822 words, the most frequent letters by share of total letters are:

At the other end, Q, J, X, Z, and W are each under 1% of all letters — which is exactly why grids containing them tend to feel sparse and why words containing them stand out as satisfying, non-obvious finds.

The 15 Most Common Two-Letter Sequences (Bigrams)

Scanning every adjacent letter pair inside every word, these bigrams appear most often:

ES, IN, ER, TI, RE, TE, ON, AT, NG, ED, ST, IS, EN, AL, LE

If you spot any of these two letters touching on a grid, it’s statistically one of the highest-value starting points for building outward in either direction — this is the data behind strategy tip #2 in our solving guide.

The 15 Most Common Three-Letter Endings

Looking only at words five letters or longer, the most frequent three-letter endings are:

-ING, -ERS, -SES, -IES, -ESS, -ONS, -TED, -ION, -TES, -EST, -BLE, -NGS, -LLY, -ATE, -STS

-ING is dramatically ahead of every other ending — it appears at the end of over 14,000 words in the dictionary, nearly double the second-place -ERS.

The 15 Most Common Three-Letter Prefixes

On the front end of words five letters or longer, the most frequent three-letter starts are:

PRE-, CON-, OVE-, DIS-, NON-, PRO-, OUT-, INT-, MIS-, SUB-, ANT-, TRA-, COM-, RES-, REC-

Double Letters Are More Common Than You’d Think

23.67% of all words in the dictionary — nearly one in four — contain at least one repeated letter somewhere in the word (like the double L in “hollow” or the double S in “less”). That’s a high enough rate that spotting two identical, adjacent tiles on a grid is genuinely worth pausing on.

Word Length Distribution

Nine-letter words are the single most common length in the entire dictionary, with 31,079 entries — very slightly ahead of eight-letter words at 31,339 (essentially tied for the top spot), and well ahead of every other length. Four-letter words, by contrast, are the rarest category at just 4,142 entries, which is part of why short words can occasionally feel harder to land on than you’d expect on a dense grid.

How to Use This

None of these patterns are a substitute for actually scanning the board, but they’re a genuinely effective filter for where to look first. Bigrams like ES and IN are common enough that treating them as “high-priority seeds” for word-building, and endings like -ING as an automatic check whenever you see an I-N-G cluster, will consistently speed up a solve — because they reflect the actual statistical structure of the dictionary the game checks against, not just a general impression of English.