2-Letter Words — Complete List for Scrabble, Wordle & More

Two-letter words are the quiet backbone of Scrabble and Words With Friends. They are nobody’s first priority when you are trying to build a 7-letter bingo, but in a tight endgame they decide who wins. Any competitive player memorises the full TWL list of two-letter words because every hook and every parallel play on a crowded board depends on knowing them cold.

The official TWL two-letter list includes familiar entries like IS, IT, ON, AT, and BY, but also stranger ones that trip up casual players: AA (a kind of lava), QI (vital life force), ZA (pizza), XU (a Vietnamese coin), XI (a Greek letter), JO (a sweetheart), KI (the same concept as QI), and OE (a whirlwind off the Faeroe Islands). These obscure entries are what make 2-letter words so strategically valuable — they let you dump high-value tiles on a cramped board when no longer playable openings exist.

In Wordle, 2-letter words have no role, but in crosswords they appear constantly as glue between longer answers. In everyday writing they are function words — articles, pronouns, prepositions — the mortar that holds the bricks of a sentence together. Note also that SOWPODS (the international Scrabble dictionary) adds a few extra two-letter entries beyond TWL, such as OB, UG, and ZO, so if you play in a TWL tournament, double-check before locking in a rarity.