Words by Letter

Starting and ending letters

Every letter A through Z has its own "starts with" and "ends with" list, generated directly from the ENABLE dictionary. These are useful in two different contexts: crossword and word-search solving, where you often know one end of a word before the other, and vocabulary browsing, where seeing the full real-word set for a given starting or ending letter reveals patterns — a handful of endings alone (plural, past-tense, and adverb markers among them) account for a strikingly large share of the alphabet's "ends with" totals.

Beyond single letters, common two-letter prefixes and suffixes — TH, ST, TR, CH and the like at the start; -ER, -ED, -LY, -ING and similar at the end — get their own pages too, because these aren't arbitrary combinations. They're the actual consonant clusters and inflectional endings that carry the heaviest load in everyday English morphology, and they come up constantly in word-game and crossword contexts.

Q, Z, X, and J — the rare, high-value letters

These four letters share two things: they're among the least frequent in English, and in every major tile-based word game, that rarity is compensated for with a high point value (Q and Z are worth 10 points in Scrabble®; J and X are worth 8; the exact numbers shift slightly for Words With Friends®, but the pattern — rare letters score more — holds in both games). Because they're rare, players are less likely to have memorized a deep mental list of words containing them, which makes a dedicated reference page genuinely more useful here than it would be for a common letter like E or S.

Q deserves a specific note: the assumption that Q always needs a following U is a Scrabble® myth. A small set of valid words — QI, QAT, QOPH, QADI, TRANQ, and a few others — let you play a Q tile with no U in sight, and knowing them can rescue an otherwise dead tile.

Reading starting-letter and ending-letter lists as two different tools

A "starts with" list and an "ends with" list for the same letter aren't mirror images of each other — English words don't distribute symmetrically across starting and ending positions. Far more words start with S than end with it as a lone consonant, for instance, while the reverse is true for several suffix-heavy letters. Treating the two lists as genuinely separate references, rather than assuming one roughly predicts the other, avoids a common false assumption when estimating how many words might fit a given board position.

This asymmetry also explains why some "starts with" pages are visibly larger or smaller than their "ends with" counterpart for the same letter — it's a real property of English morphology (certain letters cluster heavily as word-initial sounds, others as word-final suffixes), not an inconsistency in how the lists were built.

Common two-letter combinations beyond single letters

Beyond the 26 single-letter starting and ending pages, SnagWord now covers the near-complete grid of two-letter combinations — all 26x26 possible pairs are candidates in both the starting and ending direction, and the vast majority genuinely produce a useful, non-trivial word list. A small number of rare pairings (an uncommon consonant followed by another uncommon consonant, for instance) simply don't start or end enough real English words to clear the site's minimum-results bar, so those specific combinations are automatically left unpublished rather than shipped as a near-empty page — every pair that does ship, several hundred pages per direction, reflects genuine dictionary membership computed fresh from ENABLE, not a hand-picked highlight reel.

How letter rarity in the dictionary maps to letter rarity in the tile bag

It's a genuinely useful pattern to notice: the letters that are rare in written English generally line up with the letters that are rare in a Scrabble® or Words With Friends® tile bag, and the game designers set point values accordingly. Q, Z, X, and J are simultaneously among the rarest letters in the ENABLE dictionary by raw frequency and among the highest-valued tiles in both games — this isn't a coincidence, it's the entire design logic behind tile-value tables in the first place. Understanding this connection helps explain why a dedicated by-letter reference page is disproportionately useful for exactly these four letters and far less necessary for a common letter like E, where you'll rarely struggle to think of a valid word on the spot.

Browsing by letter for crossword and word-search puzzles specifically

Beyond tile-game strategy, by-letter browsing solves a distinct problem in crossword and word-search contexts: a crossing answer or a partially visible grid entry often hands you one end of a word well before the rest of it is clear. A "starts with" or "ends with" list lets you scan real candidates matching that partial knowledge directly, which is often faster than guessing blind and checking each guess individually — especially useful when the word you're hunting for is unusual enough that guessing wouldn't reliably land on it anyway.

Each by-letter page's computed facts

Like the length hubs, every by-letter page shows real numbers specific to that exact letter or combination — total matching words, the longest entry, and the top Scrabble® and Words With Friends® scorers for that specific starting, ending, or contained letter. A page for a common letter like S will naturally show a much larger total than a page for a rare one like Q, and the framing here is deliberately just that data, presented cleanly, rather than padded prose repeating the same observations letter after letter across all 26 pages.