Build From the End: Word Endings

The front of an English word can be almost anything. The end usually can't. A handful of letters finish most long words, and a handful of letter pairs finish a big share of those. That makes the last square of a slot the most predictable square on your board, and knowing how words end tells you where a letter is safe to place before you know what the word will be.

How words end, slot by slot

These figures come from WyldTyle's own dictionary, counting every playable word of each length. The two- and three-letter slots are left out: at those lengths it's easier to learn the words themselves, and the two-letter and three-letter lists have them all.

Five letters do most of the work

S, D, E, R, and Y finish about two in three five-letter words, and seven in ten six- and seven-letter words. Every one of them is a letter the dice give you regularly, except Y, which has a single face on the consonant die. So when one of these letters arrives and a long slot is still empty, the last square is almost always a safe home: you haven't decided the word yet, but you've kept most of the dictionary available.

The reverse holds too. Rare and awkward letters (K, V, W, B, P) belong at the front or in the middle of a word, where English allows almost anything. A V in the last square is close to an automatic invalid word, and the K and V page shows where those letters do fit.

S: the most wanted letter

S finishes about a third of all five-, six-, and seven-letter words, mostly plurals and verb forms. More than four in five seven-letter words that end in S are a six-letter word with an S added. That gives you a simple trick: an S in the last square of the seven-letter slot turns a hard seven-letter problem into an easier six-letter one.

The trouble is supply. S has three faces on the thirty-face consonant die, so a typical game brings two or three, and your board has five slots of five letters or more. You can't put an S at the end of all of them. Spend each S where it saves the most: usually the seven-letter slot first, then whichever long slot has the hardest front half.

E second-to-last: the flexible spot

Roughly three in ten six- and seven-letter words have an E in the second-to-last square. Behind it, the word can still finish in D, R, S, N, T, or L. Put an E there early and you've narrowed the ending to "E plus one letter" without choosing which one. Whichever of D, R, or S arrives first completes it as -ED, -ER, or -ES.

E is also the most common face on the vowel die, so this is an easy placement to make.

The big endings compared

The cheap endings are the reliable ones, and -ING, the most valuable, depends on the rarest letter. That's the usual trade-off in WyldTyle: points against certainty. The Wyld Pyle guide explains why certainty usually wins, since a fully valid board earns a 20-point bonus that no single ending can match.

Putting it together

• Common ending letter, empty long slot: place it last. S, D, R, E, and Y in the final square keep the most words available.
• Rare letter: place it early in the word. K, V, W, B, and P fit at the front far more often than at the end.
• E with nowhere obvious to go: second-to-last. In the six- and seven-letter slots it keeps three endings open at once.
• Don't build an ending you can't finish. I and N waiting for a G can leave the seven-letter slot invalid. The -ING list covers how to avoid that.
• Choose your roll with the ending in mind. If three slots are waiting on a consonant to finish, a two-consonant roll gives you two chances. The roll selection guide has the vowel arithmetic.