Why Is Q So Hard? The Trickiest Letters in Word Games

You pull a tile from the bag, turn it over, and there it is: a Q. Ten points, a little thrill of excitement – and then the slow realisation that you have no U, no plan and no idea where to put it.

Some letters are just harder to use than others. But why? And what can you do about it? We dug into the word lists behind the games on Wordletz to find out which letters really are the trickiest, where they came from, and how to turn them from a problem into points.

Just how rare are they?

We counted every one of the 113,815 words in the dictionary used by our Word Tiles game, and checked how many contain each letter. The difference between the common and rare letters is enormous:

So you’re more than 40 times as likely to find an E in a word as a J or a Q. It’s no coincidence that J, Q, X and Z are the high-scoring tiles in tile games: there’s only one of each in the bag, and they’re worth 8 or 10 points because they’re so hard to use.

The same pattern shows up in our other games. In the list of answers for our Wordle-style solver, just 28 of the 2,375 answers contain a J, and only 30 contain a Q. And in our Hangman game, Q, X and Z each turn up in just 1 answer in 50.

Q: the letter that can’t go anywhere alone

Q’s big problem is its partner. In our dictionary, 98% of words containing a Q have a U straight after it. Without a U, a Q is almost unplayable.

That habit goes back a very long way. The Romans wrote their “kw” sound as QU, and that spelling was handed down to French. English didn’t use it at first: in Old English, “queen” was spelled cwen and “quick” was cwic. After the Norman Conquest in 1066, French-trained scribes brought in their QU spelling, and it’s been stuck to Q ever since.

The few exceptions mostly come from other languages that write the sound differently. These are the Q-without-U words our Word Tiles game accepts:

Of these, QI is the one to remember. It’s short, it fits almost anywhere, and it turns a stuck Q into an 11-point play. Different games use different word lists, though, so a word like QAT (a plant), which many lists accept, isn’t in ours.

V: the letter that won’t end a word

V isn’t actually that rare – it appears in more words than K or W. Its problem is where it can go. Out of all 113,815 words in our dictionary, only 34 end in V, and most of those are abbreviations. Real words like REV, SPIV, GUV and SHIV are about all you’ve got.

Have you ever wondered why we write have, give and love with a silent E on the end? It’s partly down to history. For centuries, U and V were written as the same letter, and English spelling settled into the habit of not ending words with it. The silent E filled the gap.

V also has no two-letter words at all in our list, so you can’t tuck it into a tight spot. Play it early in a word, or in the middle, and save yourself the trouble.

J: the newest letter

J is the baby of the alphabet. For most of history it was just a fancy way of writing I. It only became a separate letter in the 1500s and 1600s, which is one reason so few English words use it.

Like V, J almost never ends a word – HAJ, HAJJ and RAJ are the main exceptions. It nearly always comes at the start or in the middle: JOKE, JUMP, ENJOY, MAJOR. The good news is that it has a handy two-letter word, JO (a Scottish word for a sweetheart), which is worth 9 points.

X: better at the end

Most people think of X as a tricky letter to start a word with – and they’re right. Only 100 words in our dictionary begin with X, and nearly all of them come from Greek, like XYLOPHONE. But nearly three times as many end in X: BOX, FOX, APEX, RELAX, AFFIX.

That makes X one of the friendliest high-value tiles. It has lots of two-letter words – AX, EX, OX, XI and XU – which means you can often play it in two directions at once. Put it on a bonus square where it forms a word across and a word down, and it scores twice.

Z: the letter that came back

Z had a wobbly start. The early Romans dropped it from their alphabet, and only brought it back later to spell words borrowed from Greek – adding it at the very end, which is why it’s still the last letter today.

It’s a little more common than X, J or Q, and it has two useful two-letter words: ZA (slang for pizza) and ZO (a Himalayan cross between a yak and a cow). There’s a spelling tip too. Our dictionary uses American spellings, and it has around five times as many words ending in -IZE as in -ISE. So if ORGANISE won’t fit, try ORGANIZE – and enjoy the extra Z.

How to handle tricky letters in each game

In Word Tiles: learn QI, ZA, ZO, JO and the X words, and aim to play your high-value tile on a bonus square. If you’re stuck with a Q and no U, don’t wait too long – exchange it. Holding it at the end of the game costs you 10 points.

In Hangman: guess common letters first and save J, Q, X and Z for the end. They’re so rare that a random guess is almost always a wasted life – unless the category and the gaps make one obvious.

In Wordle-style puzzles: don’t waste early guesses on rare letters. Spend them on common ones, then use a tool like Wordle Sleuth to see whether a J, Q, X or Z is even possible.

In Word Grid: you’ll never get a Q on its own – it always comes as a “Qu” tile, which counts as two letters. Look around it for words like QUIT, QUIET and QUOTE.

In Cipher Desk: rare letters can be a gift. If one code letter appears just once, especially in a short word, it may well be a J, Q, X or Z. And a code letter that’s always followed by the same other letter could be Q followed by U.

Turning trouble into points

The tricky letters are hard because they’re rare – and that’s exactly what makes them valuable. Once you know a handful of short words and where each letter likes to sit, the Q stops being a curse and starts being your best tile.

Want more? Our guide to the two-letter words every player should know has the full list. Or open Word Tiles and see if you can land a QI on a triple-letter square.

How we worked this out

The letter counts come from the 113,815-word dictionary used by Word Tiles, the 2,375-word answer list used by Wordle Sleuth, and the word list in our Hangman game. For each letter, we counted how many words contain it at least once. Different games and dictionaries will give slightly different numbers, but the overall picture is the same.