Guide

How word scores work

A word's score is the sum of its letters' values, with no length bonus and no board in sight. The common tile games use the same standard values: 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 repeated letter counts each time it appears, and a blank tile scores nothing. The table is a frequency ranking frozen into points: common letters score little and rare letters score a lot.

Length and score are separate races. Across the whole 172,781-word list the top scorer is the thirteen-letter RAZZAMATAZZES at 51, yet from any one rack a short word can beat a longer one by keeping the expensive letters. The word maker's sample rack, QUARTZY, shows it: QUARTZ leads at 24, and the four-letter QUAY (16) beats the five-letter QUART (14).

The expensive letters are also hard to place. Q nearly always needs a U straight after it, and this list holds just 29 words with a Q but no QU, among them QAID, QANAT, FAQIR, BUQSHA and their plurals. The shortest are QAT and SUQ. Eight of the 29 still contain a U elsewhere (BUQSHA, QIVIUT, SUQ and UMIAQ, each with its plural), so the pattern to remember is a Q with no U after it. These words are worth knowing by name, because they are the difference between a dead Q and ten points.

Reading a rack for points

Check the short words for your expensive letters before hunting long ones. On letter values alone, any word holding a J, X, Q or Z scores at least 9, more than the 7 that a seven-letter word of one-point letters reaches. The word maker runs this ranking: every word your rack can build, sorted by points with the score drawn beside it. The anagram solver answers the related question of which words use all your letters.

Short words worth learning

For points, learn the short words first. The list holds 96 two-letter words, and the best of them, AX, EX, JO, OX, XI and XU at nine points each, turn a single awkward tile into a scoring play. X makes a two-letter word with every vowel, so a rack holding an X and any vowel has a nine-point word in two letters. At three letters the top score 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 chasing seven-letter words, because the expensive letters come up every few racks and the long words do not.

Two famous two-letter Q and Z words that some modern games allow are not in ENABLE1 at all, because the list predates them. Word Sieve searches a fixed ENABLE1-derived edition with 39 entries excluded and adds no words to match a game, so your game can accept a word this list lacks. The letter values are the standard set that the common tile games share, not any publisher's tournament table, and a game's own rules and board can change a score. The methodology page explains where the list stops.