Words with their letters in alphabetical order
Some words never move backwards through the alphabet: read them left to right and every letter sits at, or after, the one before it. Our dictionary holds 637 of them, up to 7-letter words such as BEEFILY and BILLOWY — a small, specific corner of the dictionary, but a genuinely testable one.
The rule, exactly
Every letter must be alphabetically equal to or later than the one straight before it — a repeated letter is allowed, since repeating neither rises nor falls. 637 of the 168,401 words in our dictionary pass that test, just 0.4% of the whole list:
| Length | Words |
|---|---|
| 2 letters | 52 |
| 3 letters | 174 |
| 4 letters | 219 |
| 5 letters | 144 |
| 6 letters | 46 |
| 7 letters | 2 |
The longest ones
At 7 letters, our list has exactly 2:
The strict version: no repeated letters
Tighten the rule so each letter must come strictly after the one before it, no repeats allowed, and the count drops to 402, broken down by length:
| Length | Words |
|---|---|
| 2 letters | 50 |
| 3 letters | 147 |
| 4 letters | 140 |
| 5 letters | 53 |
| 6 letters | 12 |
The longest of those reach 6 letters:
Every strict alphabetical-order word is automatically an isogram too, because a letter that must come strictly after the last one can never repeat it. The reverse is not true — an isogram's letters can sit in any order at all. See our full isograms guide for that wider set.
The two-letter case
At two letters the rule is simple: does the second letter come at or after the first? 52 of our two-letter words say yes:
And 46 say no — the second letter comes at or before the first:
Where both rules meet
A word can satisfy the forward and reverse rules at once only if its letters never change at all — which, at two letters, means the same letter written twice. 2 words do exactly that: MM, AA. Every one of them is also a palindrome — see our palindromes guide for the rest of that list.
Common words that qualify
196 of the 637 alphabetical-order words are common, everyday words, 31% of the total — a reliable source of party-trick examples:
Reverse order
Flip the rule so letters may only stay the same or move backwards through the alphabet, and 429 words qualify, broken down the same way:
| Length | Words |
|---|---|
| 2 letters | 46 |
| 3 letters | 132 |
| 4 letters | 133 |
| 5 letters | 57 |
| 6 letters | 48 |
| 7 letters | 12 |
| 8 letters | 1 |
The longest reach 8 letters:
143 of those 429 are common words — THE, OF, TO, ON, WE, US, IF, ONE among them.
Elsewhere on the site
None of this needs to be memorised to be useful — test any rack of letters against either rule with the word unscrambler, or browse a length in full on the words-by-length hub to see where these words sit among everything else.