The Best and Worst Letters for Category Games, by the Numbers
If you play a category game where a random letter decides the round, S is the easiest letter by far: it starts 2,578 common English words in our count. X is the hardest, starting just 3. Q, Y and Z are almost as tough. If you use a letter wheel for games with younger players, take those four off.
Key facts
- S, C and P start the most common words: 2,578, 2,294 and 1,744.
- X, Z, Y and Q start the fewest: 3, 19, 56 and 87.
- S starts 860 times as many common words as X.
- Removing Q, X, Y and Z from the alphabet wheel makes rounds much fairer.
How we counted
We took 168,352 words from the public-domain ENABLE word list used by many word games and kept the 21,912 that are common in everyday English, based on word frequency data from the open wordfreq project. Then we counted how many start with each letter.
The full ranking
| Letter | Common words starting with it |
|---|---|
| S | 2,578 |
| C | 2,294 |
| P | 1,744 |
| A | 1,449 |
| R | 1,369 |
| D | 1,360 |
| B | 1,237 |
| M | 1,118 |
| T | 1,118 |
| F | 994 |
| E | 958 |
| I | 910 |
| H | 749 |
| L | 693 |
| G | 629 |
| W | 576 |
| O | 496 |
| U | 425 |
| N | 393 |
| V | 344 |
| J | 171 |
| K | 142 |
| Q | 87 |
| Y | 56 |
| Z | 19 |
| X | 3 |
Making letter rounds fairer
- For kids: use the alphabet wheel with Q, X, Y and Z removed (press Reset to bring them back).
- For a challenge: keep the hard letters but give double points for answers that start with them.
- For no repeats: switch on elimination mode so each letter is used once per game.
- For settling arguments: check a challenged answer against a full list, such as these words that start with Q.
Sources
- Our own count over the ENABLE word list, with common words identified using wordfreq by Robyn Speer.
