Word lists worth memorising
Four reference lists that change more games than any amount of raw vocabulary.
A word finder answers the rack in front of you. A memorised list answers the rack before you type anything — and in timed games that difference is the whole match. These four lists are the ones I hand to students first, because each one solves a specific, recurring problem: nowhere to place a tile, a Q with no U, a rack of small letters, or a rack of nothing but vowels.
All two-letter words
The full 107-word list that decides most parallel plays, with tile values and short meanings.
Open the list →Q words without a U
Sixteen legal words that use a Q with no U behind it — the fix for a stranded 10-point tile.
Open the list →High-scoring short words
Two- to four-letter words built on J, Q, X and Z, sorted by score so you can bank the big tiles fast.
Open the list →Vowel dumps
Words that shed four or five vowels at once and rescue a rack that cannot play anything.
Open the list →How to actually learn a list
Reading a list does nothing. Use it in three passes. First, read it once and note only the entries that surprise you — those are the ones costing you points. Second, cover the list and write out everything you remember; the gaps are your real study set. Third, play a game and deliberately look for a chance to use one entry from it, even if a bigger play exists. A word used once in a real game sticks better than twenty repetitions on paper.
A note on dictionaries
These lists follow the North American tournament word list (TWL). Most entries are also valid in the international SOWPODS list and in Words With Friends, but a handful differ between them. When a game rejects a word here, it is a dictionary difference, not an error — check your specific game's list before you challenge someone. You can always test a set of letters in the unscrambler or price a play in the score calculator.