Everything below comes from analysing the game's own 10,391-word dictionary and the 365 plates already scheduled. If you're stuck around six or seven words a day, the suffix trick alone should double that.
This is the single biggest shift in how you look at a plate. Most people start with the first letter and grope forward: A… ab… abr… That's slow, because the first letter is only one constraint out of three.
Instead, start from the last letter, because English has a small number of extremely productive endings. Here's how often each three-letter ending appears in the game's dictionary:
| Ending | Words in dictionary | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| -ing | 464 | present participle: dashing, dwelling |
| -ter | 187 | agent + comparative: batter, brighter |
| -ted | 128 | past tense: allotted, adopted |
| -der | 117 | agent: builder, wilder |
| -ish | 110 | adjective: sheepish, brownish |
| -ion | 90 | noun: opinion, oration |
| -ler | 86 | agent: idler, gambler |
| -per | 85 | agent: hopper, camper |
| -ent | 84 | adjective/noun: apparent, torrent |
| -red | 83 | past tense: abhorred, anchored |
| -est | 83 | superlative: hardest, haziest |
| -ker | 79 | agent: kicker, tracker |
The practical version of that table is four questions to ask on any plate:
The middle letter is the constraint that actually decides how hard a plate is. Across every playable letter combination in the game, here's how forgiving each middle letter is:
| Middle letter | Playable plates | Average words |
|---|---|---|
| A | 174 | 19 |
| I | 168 | 17 |
| E | 163 | 24 |
| O | 146 | 16 |
| R | 138 | 16 |
| N | 123 | 16 |
| L | 111 | 15 |
| U | 109 | 12 |
A middle E is the most generous letter in the game — 24 words on an average plate. If today's middle letter is E, expect a long day and set your sights above par.
At the other extreme, J and Q never appear as a middle letter on any playable plate, and Y appears on exactly one. If you ever see a middle X or Z, savour it: there are only a handful of such plates in the entire two-year calendar.
S plates are the richest in the game (191 playable combinations), followed by C, P, B and T. If you open a plate starting with S or C, there are almost certainly more words hiding than you'll find.
The thin end: K and Q plates have only seven playable combinations each, Y has one, and X and Z have none at all — you will never see a plate starting with X or Z, because no such plate has enough answers to be worth playing.
The multiplier caps at ×5 after nine consecutive correct words, and it resets on any miss. That changes how you should sequence your guesses.
Front-load your certainties. When you sit down, don't fire off the exotic word you're half-sure about. Play the five or six words you know are right, get the multiplier up, and cash in your longest confident word while it's high. An eight-letter word at ×3 is worth 18 points; the same word at ×1 is worth 6.
Guess wildly only after a reset. The moment your combo breaks, you're at ×1 and a wrong guess costs you nothing. That's the window for testing whether armload is a real word.
Take hints at zero. A hint resets your combo, so taking one mid-streak throws away everything you built. If you want a hint, take it immediately after a miss.
Hints cost 3 points per interior letter. A seven-letter word has five buyable letters — 15 points — while the word itself is worth 5 at ×1. So on pure points, hints are always a loss.
They're worth it for two other reasons. First, if the revealed word unlocks a pattern you hadn't considered (you see a c c _ _ _ _ d and suddenly remember the whole acc- family), one hint can lead to four more words. Second, clearing a plate outright is worth more than the points you spent — so when you're two words from a perfect plate, buy them.
Anything nine letters or longer that fits the plate scores as a bonus ★, extends your combo, and doesn't count against the daily total. These are pure upside and most players never try for them. On a plate starting with a common prefix — un-, over-, under-, com-, dis- — there are usually two or three sitting there: overlooked, accommodated, compromised.
Across the next year of scheduled plates, the average day hides about 18 words, with the smallest plates at 8 and the richest at 43. Par is set at roughly 30% of the plate, capped at 14. Finding half a plate is a genuinely good day; clearing one is rare enough that the game throws confetti.
Read the three letters. Ask which ending family the last letter unlocks. Write off the two or three obvious short words first to start the combo. Then work the family — past tenses, agent nouns, -ing forms — in a batch while the multiplier climbs. Check for one long bonus word before you finish. Press I'm Done and see how you did against par.