Letter Frequency in 6 Letter Words: What 682 Answers Reveal

Every count on this page comes from one source: the 682-word answer pool behind this site’s tools. Those words fill 4,092 letter slots, and tallying them produces a frequency picture that public five-letter Wordle statistics cannot supply. The headline results: E appears in 70.4 percent of answers, S opens more words than any other letter, and nearly half the pool contains a repeated letter.

None of these figures are estimates or borrowed charts. Each number was computed by script from the current data version — the same JSON file that powers the word finders. The counts describe this fixed pool, not English at large and not any official answer schedule.

The ten letters that dominate the pool

Ranked by total occurrences across all 4,092 slots:

Two details in that table are easy to miss. I and N are exactly tied at 248 occurrences. And S ranks above A on occurrences even though A appears in more words (258 versus 240) — S repeats within a single word more often than A does.

The next tier sits well back: C (130 occurrences), G (126), P (126), and U (124). At the bottom, every letter of the alphabet appears at least once: X in 12 words, J in 10, Z in 8, and Q in 5.

What this means for guesses 1 and 2. The top ten letters fit into fewer than two repeat-free guesses. Two openers that jointly cover E, R, T, S, A, I, N, L, O, and D have touched a letter set that reaches into the large majority of the pool. Rather than assembling those slots by feel, the measured starter-word experiment ranks every accepted guess against this same pool by entropy and worst-case bucket — the frequency table above explains why its leaders are built almost entirely from these ten letters.

Position 1 versus position 6

Overall frequency hides where letters actually land. The first and last slots have their own distributions, and this is information the widely shared five-letter charts cannot provide for a six-letter grid.

D and R are exactly tied at the final position with 97 words each. Y is the sixth-ranked final letter, closing 58 words (8.5 percent).

The sharpest contrast is E. It ends 104 answers but starts only 32 — the pool’s most common letter is heavily a middle-and-ending letter. Much of the back-slot traffic comes from suffixes: 81 answers end in -ER and 71 end in -ED, which also props up D and R in the overall table. Meanwhile 80 answers end in S, so an S-final probe is far from wasted.

What this means for placement. On guess 1, an S in position 1 and an E, R, or D in position 6 each test the densest cell of its column. On guesses 2 and 3, avoid parking E in position 1, where only 32 answers can reward it. And once the board confirms an opening letter, switch from frequency to filtering: after a green P, for example, the page of six-letter words starting with P applies position, repeat, and exclusion controls to every matching record.

Vowel structure: two is the default

Using the A/E/I/O/U definition — the same convention as this site’s word-list pages, with Y stored as a consonant — the pool averages 2.14 vowels per word. The distribution is tight:

• 1 vowel: 60 words (8.8%) — examples: bright, depths, crying
• 2 vowels: 468 words (68.6%)
• 3 vowels: 152 words (22.3%)
• 4 vowels: 2 words — cookie and unique

No answer has zero vowels, and none has five or more. More than two-thirds of the pool carries exactly two, and words with at most two vowels account for 77.4 percent of all answers.

Y deserves its own line because it sits outside the vowel count: 78 answers contain a Y somewhere (11.4 percent), and 58 of those place it last. A word like crying is stored as a one-vowel word even though the Y is doing vowel work.

What this means for your vowel budget. Two vowels in the opener matches the dominant shape; a third vowel slot buys access to less than a quarter of the pool, so mid-game guesses usually earn more by spending that slot on a consonant from the top-ten list. If a puzzle behaves as vowel-poor — one confirmed vowel and several dead consonants — test Y, especially in position 6.

Repeated letters: nearly half the pool

A first instinct is to treat repeats as rare. In this pool they are not: 356 answers (52.2 percent) use six distinct letters, and 326 (47.8 percent) repeat at least one. The breakdown by distinct-letter count:

The two extreme cases are needed and senses, each built from only three distinct letters.

Which letters double up? E leads decisively: it appears two or more times in 112 words (16.4 percent of the pool). R follows in 39 words, T in 37, S in 36, and L in 27. Among adjacent double letters, LL appears in 20 words (follow, dollar), EE in 19 (agreed, asleep), and TT in 17 (attack, bitter).

What this means for guess 3 and later. Keep the first guess repeat-free — six new letters gather more information. But when E is confirmed and the candidate list stays stubborn, a second E is statistically routine, not a long shot. Duplicate feedback has precise tile mechanics, and the repeated-letter strategy guide walks through how green and yellow consume a letter’s available count before setting minimum or maximum bounds.

How this pool differs from everyday English

The classic frequency order for running English text is remembered as ETAOIN SHRDLU. This pool’s order begins E, R, T, S, A, then I and N tied, then L, O, D. The comparison here is qualitative — no precise general-corpus percentages are cited — but the direction of several moves is clear.

E keeps first place in both worlds, and T holds near the top in both. The climbers are R, S, and D. R rises toward the very top on the strength of -ER endings and its 97 final-position words; D rides -ED; S benefits from 91 word-openings plus 80 word-endings. The fallers are H, O, and U. H ranks only sixteenth here, largely because everyday English inflates H through short function words such as “the” and “that,” which no six-letter answer pool contains. O slips to ninth and U to fourteenth.

The practical takeaway: a starter chosen from general English intuition tends to overrate H and U and underrate R and D for this game. Frequency tables built from the actual answer pool are the ones that match the puzzle being played.

From frequency to a solved row

Condensed into a routine: open with a repeat-free word drawn from E, R, T, S, A, I, N, L, O, D, carrying two vowels, ideally with S first or E/R/D last. Use guess 2 to cover the top-ten letters the opener missed and to probe position 6. From guess 3 on, respect the 47.8 percent repeat rate — a second E in particular.

Frequency only sets up the first move well. Once real feedback exists, filtering beats statistics: the candidate solver that filters by green, yellow, and gray feedback applies your exact board constraints against the same 682 answers these tables were computed from.

Data review: August 23, 2026. Pool version: answers-ef976d79dbc2_guesses-27c282147058. Every count on this page was computed by script from the 682-word answer pool in that data version; a pool change would change these tables. The pinned source, formulas, and correction process are documented in the word-list methodology.