Fridays in Spellwise are Six-letter Fridays. That one extra letter changes which first guesses pay off, so we counted every six-letter word the game accepts as a guess and compared it with the five-letter list.
Both lists come from ENABLE, a public-domain word list that Spellwise uses to check guesses. The six-letter list has 15,232 words and the five-letter list has 8,636. All figures below were computed on November 14, 2026.
What changes with one more letter
Four numbers show the difference:
| Five letters | Six letters | |
|---|---|---|
| Words that contain an E | 44.9% | 61.2% |
| Words that repeat a letter | 34.4% | 52.3% |
| Words with three vowel letters (A, E, I, O, U) | 9.2% | 28.2% |
| Words in the list | 8,636 | 15,232 |
E goes from being in fewer than half of words to more than three in five. More than half of six-letter words use some letter twice, so a word with six different letters is a little less likely than one with a repeat. And a third vowel shows up in more than a quarter of words, three times as often as in five-letter words.
In practice: don’t rule out a repeated letter or a third vowel too early on a Friday.
Which letters show up most
This is the share of words that contain each letter at least once, for the ten most common letters in six-letter words:
| Letter | Six-letter words | Five-letter words |
|---|---|---|
| E | 61.2% | 44.9% |
| S | 45.6% | 46.3% |
| A | 43.2% | 40.5% |
| R | 39.9% | 30.9% |
| I | 36.0% | 28.1% |
| O | 31.4% | 29.3% |
| L | 29.8% | 25.1% |
| N | 29.3% | 21.4% |
| T | 28.6% | 24.2% |
| D | 24.5% | 18.2% |
The biggest gains from five to six letters are E, R, I, N and D. A few letters go the other way: Y drops from 15.3% to 12.7% and K from 10.2% to 8.7%.
Where the letters sit
Position matters too. In six-letter words:
- First letter: S leads (11.8%), then C (8.5%) and B (7.0%).
- Second letter: A (17.6%), E (14.2%) and O (14.0%) are close.
- Third letter: nothing dominates. R leads with 9.6%.
- Fourth letter: I leads with 11.7%.
- Fifth letter: E is there in 30.8% of words.
- Sixth letter: S (28.1%), then D (11.9%) and E (11.4%).
That fifth-place E and sixth-place S or D come largely from endings like -ES, -ED and -ER. Which brings up the main catch in a count like this.
Plurals and past tenses tilt the list
A dictionary list counts every plural and every past tense. In the six-letter list, 4,277 words (28.1%) end in S and 9.9% end in -ED.
Spellwise’s answers are picked by hand, so the answer pool is a much smaller set than the guess list. If you expect the answer to be a base word rather than a plural, it’s worth looking at the list without the words that end in S. That leaves 10,955 words, and the ranking shifts:
- S falls from 45.6% of words to 24.3%.
- E rises from 61.2% to 64.4%.
- The top ten becomes E, A, R, I, N, L, O, T, D and S.
Starting words, ranked two ways
Two scores, both averages over every word in the list:
- Letters found: how many of the starting word’s letters appear somewhere in a word from the list.
- Right spot: how many of its letters land in exactly the right position.
These are familiar words picked from near the top of the rankings. The first two columns are letters found, with and without the S-ending words; the third is right spot, without them.
| Starting word | Letters found, full list | Letters found, no S-ending words | Right spot, no S-ending words |
|---|---|---|---|
| LINEAR | 2.39 | 2.50 | 0.53 |
| RETAIN | 2.38 | 2.48 | 0.51 |
| RETAIL | 2.39 | 2.48 | 0.48 |
| DERAIL | 2.35 | 2.47 | 0.51 |
| TIRADE | 2.33 | 2.45 | 0.51 |
| SERIAL | 2.56 | 2.43 | 0.62 |
| ARISEN | 2.55 | 2.43 | 0.62 |
| SATIRE | 2.55 | 2.41 | 0.68 |
| RAISED | 2.50 | 2.40 | 0.84 |
| REASON | 2.51 | 2.36 | 0.47 |
| LOITER | 2.27 | 2.35 | 0.80 |
Among these words, SERIAL, ARISEN and SATIRE come out on top with plurals counted, because they include S. Without them, LINEAR, RETAIN and RETAIL lead. RAISED and LOITER find slightly fewer letters but put more of them in the right spot, because -ED and -ER are such common endings.
Every word in the table shares at least one letter with about 98% of the six-letter words that don’t end in S, so any of them will almost always light something up. The differences between them are small. Pick one you like and will remember.
The same count for five letters
For comparison, among the 5,941 five-letter words that don’t end in S:
- IRATE finds 1.80 letters on average.
- ARISE, RAISE, AROSE, LATER, ALTER and ALERT each find 1.76.
- CRANE and SLATE find 1.64.
- ADIEU finds 1.59. It shares at least one letter with more words (93.6%) than IRATE does (92.8%), but it finds fewer letters overall and puts fewer in the right spot (0.36 against 0.41).
With the S-ending words included, AROSE scores highest of these, at 1.92 letters found.
How to use this on a Friday
- Open with a word from the table above, or any six-letter word with E, R, A and I plus two of N, L and T.
- Watch the ending. If your guesses keep turning up E and D or E and R near the end, test -ED and -ER.
- Expect a repeat. More than half of six-letter words use some letter twice.
- Still stuck after three guesses? Spellwise offers a clue: the word’s part of speech. Your streak still counts.
For more on working out words you don’t know, see how to solve a word you’ve never seen.
What this count can’t tell you
These scores measure letter overlap. They don’t tell you how many guesses a whole game takes, which would need a full solver run against an answer list, and we didn’t run one. The lists also include rare and technical words that a daily puzzle is unlikely to use.
If you play five-letter games like Wordle, Friday will feel different. Now you know why. Play today’s word or read how Spellwise works.