Original LetterWise Analysis

Most Common Letters in 5 Letter Words

We counted every letter in 12,578five-letter entries to see which letters appear most often and where they tend to occur.

#1 by word presence

s45.7%

Appears in 5,752 different five-letter entries.

#2 by word presence

e44.0%

Appears in 5,540 different five-letter entries.

#3 by word presence

a41.2%

Appears in 5,184 different five-letter entries.

What we measured

This analysis uses the current LetterWise word dataset. For each letter, we measured both word presence—how many different words contain the letter—and total occurrences, which counts a repeated letter more than once.

Word presence is usually the more useful number for a first word-game guess because it shows how widely a letter is spread across the list. Occurrences help explain the effect of double letters.

Top 10 letters in five-letter words

Ranked by the number of different LetterWise entries containing each letter.

Ten most common letters in the LetterWise five-letter-word list
Rank	Letter	Words containing it	Share of list	Total occurrences
1	s	5,752	45.7%	6,455
2	e	5,540	44.0%	6,471
3	a	5,184	41.2%	5,820
4	r	3,815	30.3%	4,056
5	o	3,779	30.0%	4,288
6	i	3,473	27.6%	3,640
7	l	3,036	24.1%	3,287
8	t	2,966	23.6%	3,219
9	n	2,709	21.5%	2,870
10	u	2,351	18.7%	2,426

The most common letters by position

A letter can be common overall but much more useful in one position than another. These are the top three letters for each position.

First letter

1. s1,529
2. c898
3. b886

Second letter

1. a2,185
2. o2,028
3. e1,581

Third letter

1. a1,219
2. r1,167
3. i1,022

Fourth letter

1. e2,255
2. a1,050
3. t878

Fifth letter

1. s3,830
2. e1,485
3. y1,252

What the results mean for word games

S leads because this is a broad word list

S appears in the most different entries, helped by plural nouns and verb forms. E has slightly more total occurrences, showing why presence and raw letter count answer different questions.

Position changes the best choice

S is especially common at the beginning and end of entries, while vowels dominate the second position. Position-specific clues are therefore more useful than overall frequency alone.

Unique letters reveal more early

8,079 entries in this dataset use five different letters. A balanced no-repeat guess can test more possibilities early, although repeated letters become important once the clues point toward them.

Method and limitations

Counts are generated from the current LetterWise dataset at build time, not copied from an external frequency table.
The dataset is a broad English word list and is not the official answer list for Wordle or any other individual game.
Different dictionaries include different plurals, inflections, regional spellings, and uncommon words, so their rankings vary.
Word presence counts a letter once per word; total occurrences count repeated letters separately.