Word Sieve

Five-letter words · ENABLE1, 172,781 words · one shard, read once

Every five-letter word the dictionary holds, in one list

All 8,624 of them in alphabetical order, with a count beside every letter. Narrow the list by what a word starts with, contains or ends with; the filters run over words the page already holds, so nothing is fetched twice. The first 1,500 are painted, and the page says so. The starting-words guide measures which of them open best.

Length5 letters Starts withany Containsany Ends withany Words listed— Painted here— Sections— DictionaryENABLE1 · 172,781 words

Letters only; each box matches its letters side by side, in the order typed. Leave all three empty for the whole list. To pin a letter to a known square, use the crossword solver.

The word index is not loaded yet. It ships as 14 plain-text shards, one per word length, totalling 3,203,788 bytes. This page pulls exactly one of them, and that shard's measured size appears here once the list loads.

What is listed

What is listed. Every five-letter entry in the word list, in alphabetical order, narrowed by up to three runs of letters. The list has no ranking or frequency weighting and takes no view on which words are worth playing. The count beside each letter is the size of that section.

How it is kept. The list ships as a plain text file, wordlist/enable1.txt. Before publication it is split into an anagram-key index with one file per word length, and the 4,272 entries of 16 letters or more are left out of the index. This page reads one of those files, the five-letter shard, and reads it once. The filters are text matches over the words that shard already holds, so changing a filter downloads nothing. The shard is fetched after the page loads, so it does not count toward page weight, and its size is printed under the list.

What it cannot tell you. Whether a word is a good guess, since nothing here knows what you have tried. Proper nouns and hyphenated forms are not in the list.

Questions

How many five-letter words are there?
8,624 in the list this page reads: Word Sieve's ENABLE1-derived edition, with 39 entries excluded, a public-domain word list of 172,781 entries. Another dictionary gives another number. The Words listed figure in the strip is counted from the shard the page just loaded.
Why does the list stop partway through the alphabet?
Laying out all 8,624 words takes seconds on a phone, so the page paints the first 1,500 alphabetically and says so under them. The section counts cover every match, so a letter past the cutoff still shows its full size. A filter brings the words you want inside the first 1,500.
What do the three filter boxes do?
Each box takes a run of letters that must appear side by side in that order, and the three are separate tests: starts with, contains anywhere, ends with. One letter can satisfy two boxes at once; a word starting with S also contains an S. A run longer than five letters cannot fit in any word here, and the page tells you so.
Will these words be valid in my word game?
Sometimes. ENABLE1 is a general English word list. Games judge by their own lists, which are proprietary compilations not used here, so your game may refuse a word listed here and accept a word this list lacks.
Do the letters I type leave my device?
No. The page fetches one file, the five-letter slice of its word index, and every filter after that is a text match in your tab. The site's Content-Security-Policy limits connections to its own origin, so your browser blocks any request that would carry your letters somewhere else before it is made.

The rest of the sieve