Every two-letter word — and why they win Scrabble games
Our dictionary contains exactly 96 two-letter words. Learning them is the single cheapest upgrade a Scrabble player can make: they unlock parallel plays, turn dead racks into points, and win endgames.
Why two-letter words win games
The strongest Scrabble plays are rarely long words; they are short words laid alongside existing ones, scoring in two directions at once. Every tile you place next to an existing word must itself form a valid word crossways, and almost all of those crossing words are two letters long. A player who knows all 96 can hook a five-letter word flat against another and score every crossing pair; a player who knows only AN, AT and IT simply cannot see the play.
The full list
Common first, as everywhere on this site:
The strange ones, explained
Most two-letter words are everyday English. The rest look like typos until you know them — and they are precisely the ones that rescue bad racks:
- aa — rough, cindery lava (from Hawaiian)
- ae — one (Scots)
- ai — the three-toed sloth
- ba — the soul, in Egyptian mythology
- ef — the letter F spelled out
- el — an elevated railway
- em — a printer's measure — the width of an M
- en — a printer's measure — half an em
- et — dialect past tense of eat
- fa — the fourth note of the musical scale
- id — the instinctive part of the psyche
- jo — a sweetheart (Scots)
- ka — the spirit or life-force, in Egyptian mythology
- li — a Chinese unit of distance
- mu — a Greek letter — as are nu, xi and pi
- od — a hypothetical force once thought to pervade nature
- om — a sacred syllable in Hindu and Buddhist practice
- op — a style of art (op art)
- os — a bone (anatomy)
- ut — the old name for the musical note do
- xu — a Vietnamese coin, one hundredth of a dong
Musical notes (fa, la, mi, re, si, ti, ut), spelled-out letters (ef, ar, es, em, en, pe), and Greek letters (mu, nu, xi, pi) account for a good share of the list — three families worth learning as families.
Scoring: the premium pairs
| Word | Face value |
|---|---|
| AX | 9 |
| EX | 9 |
| JO | 9 |
| OX | 9 |
| XI | 9 |
| XU | 9 |
| BY | 7 |
| HM | 7 |
The vowel dumps matter as much as the scorers: AA, AE, AI, OE let you offload a vowel-heavy rack without surrendering the turn.
One honest caveat about dictionaries
Our list is built from ENABLE, a public-domain lexicon widely used by word games. The official tournament dictionaries are commercial and move on: their recent editions famously added QI, ZA and (in the North American list, from 2018) OK, none of which appear in ENABLE. If you play with a Collins or NASPA list, check its two-letter table before you challenge an opponent — and see our Q-without-U list for more Scrabble rescue material. To find what your own rack can make, try the word unscrambler.