Which words actually show up
Which word lengths dominate a deal, and the short vowel-heavy words that head the frequency list — none of them anywhere near a sure thing.
Why your board looks the way it does
A board's haul is not spread evenly across word lengths, and the reason is a tug of war. The dictionary holds many times more medium-length words than short ones — but any one long word is far less likely to land on your tray. Multiply the two and you get the board you actually see. Every scale below is logarithmic: each gridline is 10×. Hover or tap any length to follow it through all three panels.
The tug of war, length by length
Even the commonest word misses most boards
If the tug of war says which lengths you'll see, this says which words. The surprise is the ceiling: the single most frequent word in the dictionary turns up on fewer than one board in four, and the list falls away from there. There are no sure things — only a short, vowel-heavy head that recurs far more often than anything else, because the dice are vowel-rich and a vowel-heavy word has more places to land.