Enter criteria and click Find Words
681 five letter words begin with R, and a third of them take E as the second letter.
E leads at about thirty three percent, well clear of A at twenty one and O at nineteen. I takes twelve and U eleven.
That makes R one of the more lopsided openings, since one branch holds a third of everything.
RE attaches to a great many verbs, and at five letters that produces REPLY, REFER, REACH and dozens more.
So the E branch is not one family but a productive prefix, which is why it runs so far ahead of the others.
RIGHT, RATES, RANGE, RADIO and ROUND cover the other four branches, and RIGHT is the most common word in the whole group.
None of those branches holds a prefix family, so they behave as ordinary scattered lists rather than as blocks.
RATES or RAISE is the better first guess than anything on the E branch, because the RE words share so little past those two letters.
Confirming E second tells you which third of the group you are in but leaves the rest of the word wide open.
RE is a prefix rather than a spelling pattern, so it combines with a large set of roots. Nothing else after R does that.
It is the most common word here, but its G and H are poor tests. RAISE or RATES rules out considerably more on a miss.
No. Unlike B, C, F and G, R never takes a second consonant in the opening position, so every branch here is a vowel.