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Thirty four words carry N second and I third, and two of the most familiar are near mirror images.
They share four letters and swap the first two, and both are entirely ordinary. Confirming the last three still leaves you with a choice between them.
That is a rare problem. Most near pairs on this site are obscure, and here both halves are words a puzzle would happily use.
UNIFY, UNION, UNITE, UNITS and UNITY all build on the Latin for one. U opens five of the thirty four, and every one of those is a UNI word.
KNIFE, ANIME, ANISE and SNIPE are the useful entries elsewhere. SNIFF and KNITS come up often enough to matter.
S opens twelve of the thirty four, more than any other letter, and A opens eight. E and S each close eight of the group.
The fourth box is the scattered one, with sixteen letters appearing across thirty four words. Nothing there is worth betting on.
Test the first box directly. Nothing later in the word will tell them apart, so a guess carrying U or O in position one is the efficient move.
A stinging cell in a jellyfish or sea anemone. It is one of very few English words opening with CN.
Near or nearby, an archaic form. It belongs with the older a words that English has mostly dropped.