Two letter Scrabble words

5 March 2019

There are only a few dozen valid two letter words, and knowing them is the cheapest large improvement available to a Scrabble player. They let you play alongside a word already on the board and score every word you touch.

Showing 133 words valid in the dictionaries you have switched on. Change the selection in the word finder settings and this list follows it.

Which letters do the work

Counted from the list above — how many of these words each letter appears in.

• O 34
• A 31
• E 29
• I 23
• U 15
• M 13
• Y 12
• H 11
• N 10
• B 9
• D 9
• S 9
• T 9
• F 7
• P 6
• G 5
• L 5
• R 5
• W 5
• X 5
• K 5
• J 3
• Z 3
• C 1
• Q 1
• V 1

How to actually use them

The value of a two letter word is rarely the word itself — it is worth a handful of points at most. The value is that you can lay a tile next to an existing word so that it forms a valid two letter word crossways, and score both. Do that along a row of tiles and one move can create four or five scoring words at once.

This is also why the S is so precious. It hooks onto the end of an existing word and simultaneously starts a new one, and there are only a few S tiles in the bag.

Why the list is a different length depending on where you play

The number above changes with the dictionaries you have switched on, and the gap between them is unusually large for such a short list. Collins accepts 127 two-letter words; the North American tournament list accepts 107. The twenty that Collins has and the NASPA list does not are:

CH, DI, EA, EE, FY, GU, IO, JA, KO, KY, NY, OB, OO, OU, ST, UG, UR, YU, ZE, ZO

Every one of them is a real word somewhere in the English-speaking world, and every one of them will be challenged off the board at a club in North America. If you play both, learn the 107 first and treat the extra twenty as a separate list — mixing them is how you lose a turn. Which dictionary applies where covers the rest of that story.

Learning them in one evening

The whole list is short enough to memorise in a few sittings, and the fastest way is not reading it. Use the two-letter word trainer: it shows you a pair and asks valid or not. Getting one wrong and being told immediately is what makes it stick.

A shortcut that helps: most of the list is ordinary. The ones that trip players up are the few dozen unusual pairs — the ones with Q, X, Z, J, and the vowel pairs like AA, AE, OE, OI. Learn those separately and the rest come almost for free.

Common questions

Are two-letter words really allowed? Yes, and they are the backbone of tight play. Nothing else lets you score four words with one tile.

Which two-letter word scores most? Under Scrabble values, QI and ZA at eleven points, before any premium square. On a double letter square under the Q, QI is worth twenty-one.

Is ZO valid? In Collins, yes. In North American tournament play, no. That single word is a good illustration of why every result on this site links to a page that answers per list rather than in one word.

What comes after the twos? The three letter words — a longer list with a slower payoff, but the same idea: they are what let you fit a move into a gap that has no room for anything else.