XU

Worth 9 points before any premium square, and the highest-scoring of the 96 — tied with 5 others.

Hooks

An opening rack can play it

1.6%

Spending a blank

5.5%

Nothing extends XU. No letter in front of it and no letter behind it makes a three-letter word, which makes it one of only 2 dead ends on the list. That is a limitation when you are building and a tool when you are not: a word nobody can extend is the safe thing to put next to a premium square you would rather your opponent could not reach.

Every hook

In front — makes _XU

No letter in front of XU makes a word.

Behind — makes XU_

No letter after XU makes a word.

How often you can actually play it

Out of an opening rack, 1.57% of the time you hold the letters for XU outright, the 2nd least likely of 96. Counting a blank as whichever letter is missing lifts that to 5.46%, though spending one of the two blanks on a two-letter word is rarely the play. Exact hypergeometrics over the 100-tile bag, not a simulation.

Read the hook count as a floor. Hooks are counted against ENABLE’s 972 three-letter words. Both official lists carry more three-letter words than that, so a word’s real hook count at a rated game is this number or higher, never lower. How much higher is not quantified here, and this page will not guess at it.Which list this is. ENABLE, which is public domain — the reason it can be published here at all. Its 96 two-letter words are a strict subset of NWL2023’s 107; the 11 it does not carry are DA, EW, FE, GI, KI, OI, PO, QI, TE, ZA, OK. Collins adds 20 more again — the letters those add back are set out on the index page.

Every two-letter word

Try next

All 96, ranked

Which ones hook, which ones are dead ends, and the four letters that have none.

The 972 three-letter words

Three quarters of them are a two-letter word plus one tile.