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Twenty two words carry E second and F third, and most of them are a prefix bolted onto a short stem.
R opens eight of the twenty two and D opens four, giving REFER, REFIT, REFIX, DEFER, DEFOG and DEFAT. Each is a familiar prefix doing familiar work.
That makes the group easier to reason about than the count suggests. With E and F placed, working out whether the first letter is R or D covers more than half the field.
LEFTY, LEFTS, HEFTY, HEFTS and WEFTS come straight from the nouns left, heft and weft. KEFIR, a fermented milk drink, is the borrowing in the group.
S closes six of the twenty two and Y closes four. Between them they take a good share of the last box, so testing for a plural or a Y ending pays off early.
They differ in a single box, so trying one narrows the other immediately. REFER is the more common of the two.
A fermented milk drink from the Caucasus, now sold widely. It is the most useful word here that is not built from a prefix.
Australian slang for a refugee, now dated and treated as offensive. It is one of two entries here that repeat a letter.
An F at position three needs a short vowel in front, and English mostly puts F elsewhere. What survives is prefixes and a handful of noun stems.