All 107 Two-Letter Words

If you learn one word list, learn this one. There are exactly 107 valid two-letter words in standard North American Scrabble, and knowing them is the clearest dividing line between casual and competent play. They let you squeeze a play into a board with almost no space, hook onto an existing word for a parallel play, and offload an awkward tile without wasting a turn.

This is not a vocabulary exercise. Most of these words you already know. The handful you do not — the Greek letters, the Hebrew letters, the musical scale tones, and about a dozen genuine oddities — are the ones worth the twenty minutes it takes to commit them to memory.

The complete list, A to Z

Scrabble and Words With Friends assign different values to some letters, so both are given. Where they differ, the Words With Friends value is usually higher for consonants and lower for Y.

Grouped by first letter, for memorising

The full table is for looking things up. This grouping is for learning — work through one letter at a time rather than trying to absorb all 107 at once. Note that no valid two-letter word begins with C or V.

The twelve highest-scoring two-letter words

These are the plays that turn a cramped board into points. QI and ZA are the two most valuable, and both were added to the official dictionary in 2006 — older players and older word lists often miss them.

• QI (11 pts) — vital life force in Chinese philosophy. The most useful high-value word in the game, because it needs only an I to play and there are nine I tiles in a set.
• ZA (11 pts) — pizza. One Z tile, one A tile, eleven points, and it fits almost anywhere.
• AX, EX, OX (9 pts) — three ways to place the X, which is the easiest high-value tile to play because it works in two directions at once.
• XI, XU (9 pts) — the X leading rather than trailing. XI is a Greek letter; XU is Vietnamese currency.
• JO (9 pts) — a sweetheart, from Scots. The standard way to unload a J.
• BY, HM, MY (7 pts) — HM is the surprising one. It has no vowel, which makes it invaluable when your rack is all consonants.
• KA (6 pts) — the spiritual self in Egyptian religion. Pairs with KI for two ways to place a K.

The ones players actually get wrong

Most of the 107 are ordinary English. These are the entries that cause challenges and arguments:

• Greek letters: MU, NU, PI, XI. All valid, all useful.
• Hebrew letters: FE, PE. Both valid.
• Scale tones: FA, LA, MI, RE, SI, TE, TI, UT. Eight of them, which is why they are worth learning as a set. UT is the old name for what is now called DO.
• Vowel-only words: AA, AE, AI, OE, OI. Five words made entirely of vowels — the correct answer to a rack clogged with vowels.
• No-vowel words: HM and MM. Both valid, both invaluable with an all-consonant rack.
• Recent additions: OK and EW joined the official list in 2020. Many players still challenge them.
• AA — rough, cindery lava. Consistently the most challenged word on the list, and consistently valid.

Why this list wins games

The practical value is not the points the two-letter word itself scores. It is the parallel play. When you lay a word alongside an existing word rather than perpendicular to it, every letter that touches forms a new two-letter word, and you score all of them. A five-letter word played parallel to an existing word can form four or five separate two-letter words simultaneously, and you collect the points for each.

That is where games are won. A player who knows all 107 can look at a crowded board and see openings that a player who knows sixty of them simply cannot. It also changes your endgame: with two tiles left and a nearly full board, knowing the complete list is often the difference between playing out and being stuck with tiles that deduct from your score.

For the letter values behind these scores, see the tile values and distribution reference. For the Q specifically, the Q-without-U list covers every valid option beyond QI.