Three letter words trainer

16 November 2017

Same drill, one letter longer. Three letter words are where the list stops being memorisable in an evening and starts being a real study project.

Half of these are real. Reload the page for a new set.

Why this list is harder

There are roughly ten times as many valid three letter words as two letter ones. You will not learn them in one sitting, and trying to is the usual way people give up. The practical approach is to work through them in batches and come back, which is what reloading this page gives you.

Why it is worth the effort anyway

Three letter words are what you play when a two letter word will not fit the gap, and they are how you extend words already on the board: many of them are a two letter word plus a hook at the front or back. Learning them therefore reinforces the shorter list rather than competing with it.

They are also where the awkward tiles get played. Most of the short words containing J, Q, X and Z are three letters long — which is exactly the situation where you need them, because a high value tile stuck on your rack is costing you points every turn.

Learn them in groups, not alphabetically

Working A to Z through a thousand words is the slowest possible route. The groups that pay first:

• Twos with a hook. A large share of the list is a two-letter word plus one letter — front or back. If you know the twos, you already half-know these, and each one you learn also teaches you a hook you can use on the board.
• The awkward tiles. Threes containing J, Q, X and Z. There are not many, and they are the words that unstick a rack.
• Vowel dumps. Three-letter words that are mostly vowels, for the rack that drew four As.
• No-vowel words. A short, strange group, and the answer to the rack that has none.

You can build any of these in the word finder with the pattern field, or open the crossword solver and ask for every three-letter word containing a given letter.

A note on guessing

Half the cards here are invented, so guessing averages out to nothing. If you find yourself unsure on a card, that is the useful signal — those are the words to look up properly on their dictionary page, where you can see which lists accept them.

Common questions

How many three letter words are there? It depends on the list, and the difference is substantial: Collins holds well over a thousand, the North American tournament list several hundred fewer. The trainer follows whichever dictionaries you have switched on.

Do I need all of them? No. The useful target is fluency in the ones built from common letters plus every three-letter word containing J, Q, X or Z. The long tail of obscure threes matters only if you play competitively.

Is it worth learning fours next? Not as a list. After the threes, the return comes from bingo stems rather than from another length — there are too many fours, and they are easier to find on the fly.