Words that start with…
Enter a letter, a pair, or a whole prefix. Every word in the list that begins with it comes back, longest first, and you can pin the length or the ending at the same time.
Prefix search, and why the counts are so uneven
The twenty-six letters are nowhere near equal as openers. S starts 4,515 words in this list and X starts 71. The top three — S, C and P — account for a large share of the whole dictionary between them, which is why an S page and an X page are completely different kinds of page.
A large part of that imbalance is prefixes rather than roots. RE-, UN-, PRE-, OVER- and MIS- are productive: they attach to existing words and generate new entries wholesale, so the letters that carry them are inflated. That is also where dictionaries disagree most — one list admits a prefixed form the next one leaves out, and the totals drift apart.
Combining a prefix with everything else
A prefix on its own rarely narrows enough. Pair it with a length and the list usually drops to something readable in one screen, which is the point at which a word list stops being a wall and starts being useful. Pair it with an ending instead and you get the crossword answer directly: starts with ST, ends with E, five letters is a very short list.
The excluded-letters box does the opposite job and is the one people forget. If you know a word does not contain A or E, saying so removes most of the candidates in a single step — far more than adding another known letter usually does.
The table below is the whole alphabet at a glance, with the complete five-letter list for each letter one click away. It is generated from the same list the search box queries, so the counts and the pages cannot disagree.
Every opening letter, counted
How many words in this list start with each letter, in total and at the two lengths people search for most. The letter links through to the complete five-letter list for it.
| Starts with | All lengths | 4 letters | 5 letters |
|---|---|---|---|
| A | 2,373 | 192 | 497 |
| B | 2,436 | 251 | 589 |
| C | 3,393 | 228 | 662 |
| D | 2,209 | 231 | 455 |
| E | 1,452 | 102 | 192 |
| F | 1,808 | 189 | 429 |
| G | 1,422 | 189 | 414 |
| H | 1,470 | 189 | 334 |
| I | 973 | 58 | 118 |
| J | 422 | 85 | 133 |
| K | 536 | 120 | 205 |
| L | 1,508 | 208 | 401 |
| M | 2,047 | 208 | 443 |
| N | 755 | 104 | 200 |
| O | 951 | 107 | 181 |
| P | 2,858 | 256 | 565 |
| Q | 187 | 14 | 53 |
| R | 2,232 | 182 | 419 |
| S | 4,515 | 350 | 1,053 |
| T | 2,172 | 247 | 547 |
| U | 617 | 37 | 117 |
| V | 695 | 74 | 161 |
| W | 1,115 | 165 | 295 |
| X | 71 | 1 | 13 |
| Y | 248 | 70 | 94 |
| Z | 151 | 31 | 51 |
Common questions
Which letter starts the most words?
S, with 4,515 words of three to nine letters in this list — well ahead of the next letter. The tail is Q, Z and X, which between them start fewer words than S does alone.
Can I search for a prefix rather than a single letter?
Yes. The starts-with box takes as many letters as you like, so ST, STR or STRAI all work, and the results narrow as you type. Anything that is not a letter is ignored rather than treated as an error.
Every word, grouped by how long it is
The complete list at each length. Three letters is a page you memorise; nine is a page you search.
Five-letter words by opening letter
The complete list for each letter, with how many there are. S is a page you scroll; X is a page you read.
- A 497
- B 589
- C 662
- D 455
- E 192
- F 429
- G 414
- H 334
- I 118
- J 133
- K 205
- L 401
- M 443
- N 200
- O 181
- P 565
- Q 53
- R 419
- S 1,053
- T 547
- U 117
- V 161
- W 295
- X 13
- Y 94
- Z 51