Which words pay for the effort
Frequency times points, ranked — plus the plural tax refund: how often finding a word quietly hands you its plural, and why it isn't more often.
Which words are actually worth knowing
Frequency alone doesn't tell you what to study. Multiply each word's chance of showing up by what it pays, and you get its expected points per board — and because those add up to exactly the average board's score, "knowing the top N words" becomes a real percentage of a real board. Here's how far a memorized list actually gets you.
Diminishing returns, one word at a time
Where the points live
The ranking itself, best value first
One word, two words: the plural tax refund
The list above tells you which words to learn. This one tells you which words you sometimes get free. When a word is sitting on your board, its +S form is sitting there too about a quarter of the time — and the reason it isn't there far more often, given how many boards hold an S at all, is the most useful thing on this page. Two different numbers live here, and they disagree on purpose: the refund is a probability, the length-controlled index is a ratio around 1.0. Keep them apart.