Vowel-Heavy Words

Every WyldTyle player has had the game where the dice will not stop rolling vowels. Your board is a sea of A, E, I, and O, your consonants are spent, and three slots are still open. These are the words for that game: playable words that are mostly vowels, grouped by length.

What counts as vowel-heavy

The lists below use a strict threshold. A four-letter word needs three vowels, a five-letter word needs four, a six-letter word needs four, and a seven-letter word needs five. Y is treated as a consonant throughout, matching how the game's dice work: Y lives on the consonant die.

A few words are vowels all the way through. AA, AE, and OE are two-letter words made entirely of vowels, and EAU is the only three-letter one. Beyond that, English demands at least one consonant, but as you will see, sometimes only just.

The small number after each word is its WyldTyle score with no wild tiles. Letter values are on the scoring guide.

How to avoid needing this page

A flooded board is almost always a roll-selection problem. The default consonant-and-vowel roll delivers one vowel every turn, nineteen vowels across the game, but a full board of eight typical words only needs about fourteen. If you call consonant-and-vowel every turn, you are guaranteeing a surplus of five vowels, and they have to go somewhere.

The fix is to call two consonants whenever your open slots already hold their share of vowels. As a rough guide, a slot is vowel-satisfied when it has one vowel per two and a half letters: one for a two- or three-letter word, one or two for a four- or five-letter word, two for a six-letter word, and two or three for a seven-letter word. The roll selection guide lays out the whole method.

How to use these words when it is too late

• Six letters is the sweet spot. There are more than two hundred six-letter words with four vowels, and many of them are common: AERATE, ANEMIA, EASIER, ORIOLE, OUTAGE, UNEASE. If a six-letter slot is vowel-flooded, it can very often still be saved.
• Five letters is the tightest. Only eighteen five-letter words have four vowels, and they are obscure: ADIEU, AUDIO, and AIOLI are the ones most people know. If a five-letter word has three vowels already and two slots open, it needs consonants, not another vowel, so call two consonants.
• Remember the two-letter escape. AA and AE are valid. A pair of leftover vowels can always finish the two-letter slot, and finishing any slot protects the Wyld Pyle bonus.