Two letter words trainer

16 November 2017

You are shown a two letter combination. Decide whether it is a valid word, then open the card to check. Half of them are real.

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

Why drill this list

Two letter words are what let you play parallel to a word already on the board. Instead of finding one open space, you lay several tiles alongside an existing word so that each one forms a valid two letter word crossways — and you score every one of them.

The list is short enough to learn completely, which is not true of any other group of words in the game. That combination of small and high value is why club players know these before they know anything else.

Which list are you being tested on

The valid answers follow the dictionaries you have switched on in the word finder. That matters here more than anywhere: several two letter words are valid in Collins and not in the North American lists. Training on the wrong list will teach you words you cannot play.

The invented combinations are checked against every dictionary we hold, so a card marked "not a word" is not valid anywhere — it is not simply missing from your selection.

How to drill this so it actually sticks

Recognition speed is the goal, not recall. At the board you never have to produce the list from memory — you look at a gap and need to know, in under a second, whether XU fits. That is a different skill from being able to recite the twos, and it is trained by being asked, not by reading.

• Short and often. Ten minutes daily beats an hour once a week.
• Say your answer out loud before opening the card. Thinking “probably” and then seeing the answer teaches you nothing; committing does.
• Keep a list of the ones you miss. It will be short, and it will be the same twenty for weeks. Those twenty are your actual homework.
• Stop when you start guessing. Fatigued drilling trains hesitation.

The ones everybody gets wrong

The failures cluster. Vowel pairs (AA, AE, OE, OI, OU) look invented and mostly are not. Pairs with the awkward letters (QI, XI, XU, ZA, JO, KA, KI) look invented and are exactly the ones worth points. And a handful of ordinary-looking pairs are not words at all, which is why the trainer shows invalid cards at the same rate as valid ones — a drill made only of real words teaches you to answer “yes”.

Common questions

Why does a card say “not a word” for something I have seen played? Check which dictionaries are switched on. Around twenty two-letter words are Collins-only, so with Collins off they are correctly marked invalid — for the game you said you were playing.

How long until this pays off? Faster than any other study in the game. The list is small, and it changes how you look at a crowded board almost immediately.

Should I learn threes at the same time? No. Finish the twos first: they are used more often, and several three-letter words are just a two with a hook on it, so the second list gets easier after the first.

When you can get through these without hesitating, see the full list with points, then move on to three letter words.