4 Letter Words

4 letter words for Scrabble and Words with Friends

Words with 4 letters are among the most used words in Scrabble and Words with Friends for several reasons.
 
For starters, they are helpful mid-game and toward the end when it becomes tricky to build larger words on the board due to the lack of space. They are also useful when players want to exchange tiles but do not wish to forfeit their turn. By playing a 4-letter word they can replace almost half of their rack and earn points doing so.
 
The opposite is also true. Sometimes, the players want to hold on to specific tiles in hopes of building a larger word with a higher score or even achieving Bingo. In those cases, a 4-letter word is small enough as to not interfere with their plans and they can still collect points from it.
 
Lastly, they are common in word games because they are easy to remember and recognize. Since they are short and have a balanced number of letters, even if they are in a jumble on the rack, the brain tends to find them right away - providing you have a rich 4-letter word vocabulary, of course.

 

Using 4-letter words as a strategy

As mentioned above, words with four letters can be used by players to avoid using certain tiles they are holding on to in hopes of building a larger word.
 
However, they can also be used as a strategy to balance the tiles on the rack when players have too many vowels or too many consonants. Words using only vowels are scarce and usually too short, and long words with many consonants need at least a couple of vowels to unite them.
 
4-Letter words present a good opportunity to balance the stacks. While hoping to get some vowels on their rack, the players can shed 4 consonants in one go using words such as PFFT, BRRR, PSST, or HWYL, for example.
 
There are no words with this length containing only vowels, but there are plenty with 3 vowels and only one consonant. For example, you have AUTO, AREA, IDEA, EASE, or OBOE.

 

What are the highest-scoring 4-letter words?

Yielding 29 points, JAZZ is the highest-scoring word with 4 letters, followed by FIZZ and FUZZ with 25 points.
 
If you are not lucky enough to have a Z or a white tile available, the next best options are all worth 18 points or less. With 18, you have JEUX, JOKY, JINX, JUJU, and QOPH.

 

What are the lowest-scoring 4-letter words?

Words containing vowels and the consonants S, R, T, L, and N are the ones that yield the lowest scores. All of these tiles are worth 1 point each which means that the word they will form will necessarily be worth 4 points.
 
The list of low-scoring 4-letter words is quite extensive and players looking to boost their overall score should be wary of them. A few common 4-point words include RULE, TAIL, USER, LION, or NOSE, for example.

See also:

2 Letter Words

3 Letter Words

5 Letter Words

6 Letter Words

7 Letter Words

8 Letter Words

9 Letter Words

10 Letter Words

11 Letter Words

12 Letter Words

13 Letter Words

14 Letter Words

15 Letter Words

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