5 FiveLetterWords

Rare five-letter words

Words that appear less than once per ten million words of English — many too rare for the corpus to measure at all.

Page 46 of 46. Read what this band means on the first page.

All 9,025 words, below Zipf 2

Each word links to its full page. The Zipf figure is the word's corpus frequency turned into a plain rate; definitions are selected and lightly formatted from Wiktionary contributors (CC BY-SA 4.0), and long entries may be shortened. A “past Wordle answer” line means the word appears in this site's recorded answer history; its solver-pressure figure ranks that recorded puzzle against all other recorded puzzles for a reference solver, so 70/100 reads “harder than 70% of them.” CEFR chips (A1–B2) estimate when English learners typically meet a word.

  1. ZOCCO below the measurement floor — too rare for the corpus to score

    Synonym of socle. — Wiktionary contributors (CC BY-SA 4.0)

  2. ZOEAE below the measurement floor — too rare for the corpus to score

    plural of zoea — Wiktionary contributors (CC BY-SA 4.0)

  3. ZOEAL below the measurement floor — too rare for the corpus to score

    Of or pertaining to zoeae. — Wiktionary contributors (CC BY-SA 4.0)

  4. ZOEAS below the measurement floor — too rare for the corpus to score

    plural of zoea — Wiktionary contributors (CC BY-SA 4.0)

  5. ZOISM below the measurement floor — too rare for the corpus to score

    A reverence for animal life or belief in animal powers and influences, as among primitive groups. — Wiktionary contributors (CC BY-SA 4.0)

  6. ZOIST below the measurement floor — too rare for the corpus to score

    One who subscribes to the doctrine of zoism. — Wiktionary contributors (CC BY-SA 4.0)

  7. ZOKOR below the measurement floor — too rare for the corpus to score

    Any Asiatic burrowing rodent native to Central Asia, in the genera Myospalax and Eospalax. — Wiktionary contributors (CC BY-SA 4.0)

  8. ZOLLE below the measurement floor — too rare for the corpus to score
  9. ZONAE below the measurement floor — too rare for the corpus to score

    plural of zona — Wiktionary contributors (CC BY-SA 4.0)

  10. ZONKS below the measurement floor — too rare for the corpus to score

    third-person singular simple present indicative of zonk — Wiktionary contributors (CC BY-SA 4.0)

  11. ZOOEA below the measurement floor — too rare for the corpus to score

    Alternative spelling of zoëa. — Wiktionary contributors (CC BY-SA 4.0)

  12. ZOONS below the measurement floor — too rare for the corpus to score

    plural of zoon — Wiktionary contributors (CC BY-SA 4.0)

  13. ZOOTY below the measurement floor — too rare for the corpus to score

    Stylish, flashy, snappy. — Wiktionary contributors (CC BY-SA 4.0)

  14. ZOPPA below the measurement floor — too rare for the corpus to score
  15. ZOPPO below the measurement floor — too rare for the corpus to score

    Alternately with and without syncopation. — Wiktionary contributors (CC BY-SA 4.0)

  16. ZORIL below the measurement floor — too rare for the corpus to score

    Alternative spelling of zorille. — Wiktionary contributors (CC BY-SA 4.0)

  17. ZORIS below the measurement floor — too rare for the corpus to score

    plural of zori — Wiktionary contributors (CC BY-SA 4.0)

  18. ZORSE below the measurement floor — too rare for the corpus to score

    The offspring of a male zebra and a female horse. — Wiktionary contributors (CC BY-SA 4.0)

  19. ZOWEE below the measurement floor — too rare for the corpus to score

    Alternative spelling of zowie. — Wiktionary contributors (CC BY-SA 4.0)

  20. ZUPAS below the measurement floor — too rare for the corpus to score

    plural of zupa — Wiktionary contributors (CC BY-SA 4.0)

  21. ZURFS below the measurement floor — too rare for the corpus to score

    plural of zurf — Wiktionary contributors (CC BY-SA 4.0)

  22. ZUZIM below the measurement floor — too rare for the corpus to score

    plural of zuz — Wiktionary contributors (CC BY-SA 4.0)

  23. ZYGAL below the measurement floor — too rare for the corpus to score

    shaped like a yoke, or like the letter H — Wiktionary contributors (CC BY-SA 4.0)

  24. ZYMES below the measurement floor — too rare for the corpus to score

    plural of zyme — Wiktionary contributors (CC BY-SA 4.0)

  25. ZYMIC below the measurement floor — too rare for the corpus to score

    Pertaining to, or produced by, fermentation. — Wiktionary contributors (CC BY-SA 4.0)

How these scores are measured

Frequency scores come from the wordfreq project (data CC BY-SA 4.0), which averages word rates across books, subtitles, news and web text. A Zipf score is the base-10 logarithm of a word's uses per billion words, so each whole point is a tenfold change in frequency: Zipf 4 is ten uses per million words, Zipf 3 is one. The four bands split the site's accepted-guess list of 14,855 five-letter words at Zipf 4, 3 and 2 — round thresholds chosen from the observed distribution, not judgments about individual words.

A score of 0.0 is a marker, not a measurement: wordfreq's corpus never saw the word often enough to score it, which is true of 5,062 words in this band. Those entries say “below the measurement floor” and sort after every measured word.

“Past Wordle answer” claims come only from this site's recorded answer history, and the working answer pool never predicts what the NYT will choose. Solver-pressure figures are percentiles among recorded puzzles for a reference solver — a claim about those puzzles, not about players. Learner levels: The CEFR-J Wordlist Version 1.5. Compiled by Yukio Tono, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. Retrieved from http://www.cefr-j.org/download.html on 1/20/2020.