Word Sieve

Every five-letter word the dictionary holds, in one list

All 8,624, common words first. They paint 1,500 at a time. Got coloured tiles from a guess? Use the 5-letter word finder.

The word index is not loaded yet. It ships as 14 plain-text shards, one per word length, totalling 3,203,788 bytes. This page pulls exactly one of them, plus the common-word list that sorts it, and that shard's measured size appears here once the list loads.

What is listed

What is listed. Every five-letter entry in the word list, narrowed by up to three runs of letters. Words in a list of 2,400 everyday five-letter words come first, A to Z; every other valid word sits under them in a "Valid but rare" fold, also A to Z. The count beside each letter is how many matches start with it, and tapping it narrows the list to that letter.

How it is kept. The list ships as a plain text file, wordlist/enable1.txt. Before publication it is split into an anagram-key index with one file per word length, and the 4,272 entries of 16 letters or more are left out of the index. This page reads one of those files, the five-letter shard, and reads it once, plus the common-word list that sorts it. The filters are text matches over the words that shard already holds, so changing a filter downloads nothing. The shard is fetched after the page loads, so it does not count toward page weight, and its size is printed under the list.

What it cannot tell you. Whether a word is a good guess, since nothing here knows what you have tried. "Common" means a word most people know, not an answer list for any game. Proper nouns and hyphenated forms are not in the list.

Questions

How many five-letter words are there?
8,624 in the list this page reads: Word Sieve's ENABLE1-derived edition, with 39 entries excluded, a public-domain word list of 172,781 entries. Another dictionary gives another number. The Words listed figure in the strip is counted from the shard the page just loaded.
Why are most of the words folded away?
The list puts the 2,400 five-letter words most people know first, then folds the valid but rare ones under them. Every word is still there. Laying out all 8,624 at once takes seconds on a phone, so the page paints 1,500 at a time, and a button under each list paints the next 1,500. The letter counts cover every match.
What do the three filter boxes do?
Each box takes a run of letters that must appear side by side in that order, and the three are separate tests: starts with, contains anywhere, ends with. One letter can satisfy two boxes at once; a word starting with S also contains an S. A run longer than five letters cannot fit in any word here, and the page tells you so.
Will these words be valid in my word game?
Sometimes. ENABLE1 is a general English word list. Games judge by their own lists, which are proprietary compilations not used here, so your game may refuse a word listed here and accept a word this list lacks.
Do the letters I type leave my device?
No. The page fetches two files, the five-letter slice of its word index and the list of common words that sorts it, and every filter after that is a text match in your tab. The site's Content-Security-Policy limits connections to its own origin, so your browser blocks any request that would carry your letters somewhere else before it is made.

The rest of the sieve

How this word list was made
Length5 letters Starts withany Containsany Ends withany Words listed— Painted here— Sections— DictionaryENABLE1 · 172,781 words