Guide

How word scores work

The standard letter values the common tile games use are a frequency ranking frozen into points: common letters cost little and score little, rare letters are expensive. One point for A, E, I, O, U, L, N, R, S and T; two for D and G; three for B, C, M and P; four for F, H, V, W and Y; five for K; eight for J and X; ten for Q and Z. A word's score is the sum of its letters — no length bonus, no board in sight.

Two consequences follow. First, length and score are different races: measured across this site's whole 172,820-word list, the highest-scoring entry is the thirteen-letter RAZZAMATAZZES at 51 — but a four-letter word can beat a five-letter word from the same rack whenever it keeps the expensive letters, which is the entire point of ranking by score instead of size. Second, the expensive letters are expensive because they are trapped: Q is nearly useless without a U, and this list holds exactly 29 words that manage a Q with no U — QAID, QANAT, FAQIR, BUQSHA and their plurals among them — worth knowing by name, because they are the difference between a dead Q and ten points.

Reading a rack for points

Score-first play means checking the expensive letters' short words before hunting long ones: a J, X, Q or Z placed in any legal word usually outscores a clever seven-letter word of one-point letters. The word maker runs exactly this ranking — every word your rack can build, sorted by points with the score drawn beside it — and the anagram solver answers the adjacent question of what uses your letters exactly. These are standard letter values, not any publisher's tournament table, and scores in a particular game can differ by that game's own rules.

The short-word economy

Point play is won with small words, and the list is specific about which. It holds 96 two-letter words, and the best of them — AX, EX, JO, OX, XI and XU, nine points each — turn a single awkward tile into a scoring play. At three letters the ceiling doubles: ZAX at 19, ZEK at 16, then FEZ, FIZ, PYX and WIZ at 15, each a rare letter carried by two cheap ones. Memorising a dozen of these does more for a score than any amount of seven-letter ambition, because the expensive letters come up every few racks and the long words do not. The pattern to drill is pairings: every consonant in the nine-point club has a two-letter escape hatch, and knowing the hatch by name is what keeps a bad rack scoring.

One honesty note the tiles make necessary: two famous two-letter Q and Z words that some modern games allow are not in ENABLE1 at all — the list predates them, and this site will not quietly patch a dictionary. If your game accepts a word this list lacks, that is a fact about the lists differing, printed here rather than papered over; the methodology page says where the list stops and why it stays unedited.