Word SieveGuides
Guides: how the words behave, measured on the list this site ships
Every number in these four guides is counted from the 172,781-word list the solvers search: Word Sieve's ENABLE1-derived edition, with 39 entries excluded. You can check any figure against the file this site serves, and each guide links to the solver that runs its technique.
- Starting words, measured: the ten five-letter openers that a letter-frequency count of this list ranks first, with the method printed beside the result.
- How word scores work: the standard letter values, why Q and Z carry ten, and the 29 words in the list that have a Q but no QU.
- Unscrambling by hand: sorted racks, affix stripping and the two-word split, the paper techniques the solvers automate.
- What makes a pangram: the sentence kind and the seven-letter-puzzle kind, and how many candidates this dictionary holds.
The guides describe the shipped list, so another dictionary can give different figures. The methodology page explains where lists disagree.