Saturdays in Spellwise are Stretch Saturdays: the word may be one you have never seen. You can’t pull it from memory, so you have to build it from how English words tend to be put together.
The figures below come from the two lists Spellwise uses to check guesses: 8,636 five-letter words and 15,232 six-letter words from ENABLE, a public-domain word list. That’s 23,868 words in all, counted on November 14, 2026. A dictionary list includes every plural and past tense, so treat these as tendencies, not rules about any one day’s answer.
Start from the ending
Endings are a good place to start, because a few of them cover a large share of words.
In six-letter words:
| Ending | Share of words | Words |
|---|---|---|
| -ED | 9.9% | 1,506 |
| -ER | 8.4% | 1,277 |
| -ES | 7.1% | 1,083 |
| -ING | 2.5% | 381 |
In five-letter words, 31.2% end in S. The most common two-letter endings are -ES (6.2%), -ED (4.5%) and -ER (4.2%).
So if your early guesses put an E in the second-to-last spot, try a D, R or S after it first. If a six-letter word shows an I and an N with nowhere obvious to go, -ING is worth a guess.
Expect two vowels
Most words in both lists have exactly two vowel letters (A, E, I, O or U, counting a repeated one twice):
| Vowel letters | Five-letter words | Six-letter words |
|---|---|---|
| None | 0.4% | 0.1% |
| One | 31.2% | 9.6% |
| Two | 58.9% | 60.3% |
| Three | 9.2% | 28.2% |
| Four | 0.2% | 1.8% |
Two things stand out. A five-letter word with one vowel is common, nearly a third of the list, so a single vowel after two guesses isn’t a sign you’ve gone wrong. A six-letter word with three vowels is common too, more than a quarter of the list.
Words with none of those five vowels are rare: 36 five-letter words and 21 six-letter ones. All but four of them use Y instead, as in NYMPH, CRYPT and RHYTHM. If you’ve found no vowel by your third guess, try Y.
Doubled letters are more common than they feel
A letter appearing twice side by side, like LL or EE, happens in 13.3% of five-letter words and 17.5% of six-letter words. Counting repeats anywhere in the word, 34.4% of five-letter words and 52.3% of six-letter words use some letter more than once.
A letter used three times is rare: 0.8% of five-letter words and 3.1% of six-letter words.
When you’re down to a few options and none of your remaining letters fit, the missing piece may be a letter you already have, used again.
Rare letters, and the Q rule
Q, J, X and Z each appear in fewer than 3% of words in either list. Q is the rarest: 75 five-letter words and 162 six-letter words contain it.
Q is almost always followed by U. Only 6 of the five-letter Q words and 10 of the six-letter ones break that pattern. Most of those are borrowed from other languages, like QANAT (an underground water channel) and QIVIUT (musk ox wool), and the best known is probably QWERTY. If you’ve confirmed a Q, put a U right after it.
Common beginnings
Beginnings are less concentrated than endings. The most common two-letter start for six-letter words is RE, at 2.9% (439 words), followed by CO, CA, ST and MA. UN starts 1.3%.
Prefixes are still useful once you have a letter in place. Of the 931 six-letter words that start with R, 439 (47.2%) have E as the second letter, so an R in the first spot is a good reason to test RE-.
Use the clue on purpose
After your third guess, Spellwise offers one clue: the word’s part of speech. Your streak still counts, and your result is marked as solved with a clue.
The part of speech is worth more than it looks, because it points at endings:
- A verb often ends in -ATE, -IZE or -EN.
- An adjective often ends in -AL, -IC, -OUS, -IVE or -Y.
- A noun often ends in -ER, -ION or -ITY.
Plenty of words break these patterns, but they give you something to test.
Think in sounds
When you have three or four letters and no idea of the word, say the pattern out loud with gaps, like _ R _ T _ _, and try the sounds that could fill them.
English is picky about how words start. Of the 400 possible pairs of consonants (leaving out Y), only 54 open any five-letter word in the list. Eight of them, ST, SH, CH, SP, TR, BR, FL and GR, start 41% of the five-letter words that open with two consonants. If your guess starts with a pair you can’t say, it probably isn’t a word.
Afterward, the card fills in the rest
Win or lose, Spellwise shows the word card: how to say the word, its part of speech, a plain definition and one example sentence. So the word you worked out letter by letter comes with its meaning. More on that in what goes on a Spellwise word card.
For starting guesses on Fridays, see six-letter starting words. Or skip the reading and play today’s word.