Word Sieve

Five-letter words · ENABLE1, 172,820 words · one shard, read once

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

All 8,636 of them, alphabetical, with a count beside every letter. The starting-words guide measures which of them open best. Narrow the list by what a word starts with, holds inside, or ends with — the filters run over words already on the page, so nothing is fetched twice. The first 1,500 are painted and the page says so; the counts are over the whole list.

Length5 letters Starts withany Containsany Ends withany Words listed— Painted here— Sections— DictionaryENABLE1 · 172,820 words

Letters only, each box a literal run rather than a pattern. Leave all three empty for the whole list. A letter pinned to a known square is a different question — the crossword solver is the shape for it.

The word index is not loaded yet. It ships as 14 plain-text shards, one per word length, totalling 3,204,287 bytes; this page pulls exactly one of them, and the measured size of that shard appears here once the list lands.

What is listed, how it is kept, and what it cannot tell you

What is listed. One thing: every entry of a named word list that is exactly five letters long, alphabetical, narrowed by up to three literal runs of letters. There is no ranking, no frequency weighting and no opinion about which words are worth playing — a word is in the list or it is not. The count beside each letter is the size of that section, counted over every match rather than the words this page had room to paint.

How it is kept. The list ships as a file, wordlist/enable1.txt, precomputed at build time into an anagram-key index split by word length. This page reads exactly one slice of it — the five-letter shard — and reads it once. The filters need no index of their own, being substring tests over words that shard already holds, which is why tightening one fetches nothing. The shard is fetched after the page loads, so it is not part of its weight, and the size is printed under the list.

What it cannot tell you. Whether a word is legal in your game: that depends on a word list this site does not use and cannot ship. Whether a word is a good guess, since nothing here knows what you have tried. Anything outside ENABLE1 — proper nouns, hyphenations, the 4,272 entries of 16 letters or more that sit outside the index. And nothing about a letter pinned to a square, which a literal run cannot express.

Questions

How many five-letter words are there?
8,636, in the list this page reads — a fact about ENABLE1, a public-domain word list of 172,820 words, rather than about English; another dictionary gives another number. The count in the strip is measured from the shard just read.
Why does the list stop partway through the alphabet?
Painting 8,636 words is a multi-second layout on a phone, so the page paints the first 1,500 alphabetically and says so under them. Nothing is hidden: the section counts are over every match rather than the painted ones, so a letter the cap never reached still reports its true size.
What do the three filter boxes do?
Each is a literal run of letters, and the three are independent tests: starts with, ends with, contains anywhere. One letter can satisfy two at once — a word starting with S also contains an S — so they are not one pattern read in order. A run longer than the word cannot fit inside it, and the page says so rather than returning an empty list.
Will these words be valid in my word game?
Sometimes, and this page will not pretend otherwise. ENABLE1 is a general English word list, not the list any particular game judges by — those are proprietary compilations not used here. A word here may be refused by a game judging against one, and a word your game accepts may be missing from it.
Do the letters I type leave my device?
No, and it is the browser that stops them rather than a promise on this page. The page fetches one file — the five-letter slice of its word index — and every filter after that is a substring test in your tab. The Content-Security-Policy pins connections to this origin alone, so a request carrying your letters elsewhere fails before it is made.

The rest of the sieve