All 4-Letter Words

Why four-letter words decide most puzzles

In a letter-circle puzzle, the four-letter words are where games are won and lost. Three-letter words are easy to spot and rarely fill much of the grid. Six- and seven-letter words are the ones you remember finding, but there are only a handful of them in any given round. The bulk of the grid (usually a good deal more than half of the slots) is four and five letters long, and those are the ones people stare past.

Part of the reason is that four-letter words are short enough to look ordinary and long enough to hide. A word like OBOE or ONYX uses letters you are already looking at, arranged in an order your eye does not naturally try. The list on this page exists so you can stop trying to generate those arrangements from memory.

How to actually use a list this long

Reading 3,903 words start to finish is not a strategy. There are two approaches that work better.

The first is to search the page. Press Ctrl+F, or Command+F on a Mac, and type the letters you are stuck on. If your puzzle grid shows a four-letter slot with a fixed R in the second position, searching for the pattern will surface candidates faster than scanning.

The second, and usually the better one, is to skip the list entirely and use the solver on the homepage. Type in the letters your puzzle actually gave you and it returns only the words those letters can build. A list of every four-letter word in English is a reference; the solver is an answer.

Patterns worth knowing

A few structural facts about four-letter words save real time at the grid. Most follow a consonant-vowel-consonant-consonant or consonant-vowel-vowel-consonant shape, which means that if you are holding three consonants and one vowel, your options narrow sharply and are worth checking exhaustively.

Words ending in -S are heavily represented, because most three-letter nouns and verbs pluralise into four letters. If your puzzle includes an S and you are stuck, try appending it to every three-letter word you have already found. That single move often clears two or three slots at once.

The letters J, Q, X and Z appear in fewer than eighty of the words on this list combined. If your letter circle contains one of them, the number of possible words collapses to something you can work through by hand, and the puzzle is usually easier than it looks.

A note on which words count

This list comes from a standard English word list used for word games. It includes plenty of entries that are perfectly valid but quite rare: archaic spellings, dialect words, and interjections that show up in dictionaries more often than in speech.

Wordscapes and Word Connect use their own internal dictionaries and will not accept all of these, and will occasionally accept words this list does not carry. When a word here is rejected by your game, that mismatch is the reason, not an error on either side.

All 3,903 Valid 4-Letter Words

Four-letter words make up a huge share of the words you'll find in any letter-circle puzzle: they are long enough to use several tiles, and short enough to spot quickly. Here's the complete list:

Want your exact letters solved?

Use the free Wordscapes Solver tool. Enter your puzzle's letters and get every valid word, grouped by length, in seconds.