The two-letter words, and how to learn them in a week

There are a little over one hundred two-letter words in the list Pangramist uses. Most players, asked to write down the ones they know, stall somewhere around thirty. That gap of seventy or so small words is the cheapest skill in the whole game, because every other improvement asks for talent or study and this one just asks for a week of five minute sessions. Nobody loses a tile game on the long words they never learned. They lose it a point or two at a time, on short plays they couldn't see.

Why two letters matter so much

A two-letter word is a tool, not a score. It lets you play alongside a word that's already on the board, touching it at one letter, so a single tile scores in two directions. It lets you set down a tile you badly need to be rid of, in a corner nobody else can use. And it turns a rack with one useless letter into a rack with a play, which saves the turn you'd have spent swapping tiles and falling behind. Learn them and you will feel the difference inside a fortnight, in games where nothing else about your play has changed.

Learn them by their first letter

Don't study an alphabetical wall of words. Work one starting letter a day, and learn each group as a family. The A group is small enough to hold in one look: words like AA, AB, AD, AE, AG, AH, AI, AL, AM, AN, AR, AS, AT, AW, AX, AY. Say them, picture a short meaning or a sound for each, and move on. The next day takes the E group, then I and O together since they're short, then the busy consonants. Studying by family works because the board asks you a family question, never a whole list question. You will always be asking: I have an A to place, what can follow it? Learn the answers in the shape the game asks them.

There's one honest footnote to any two-letter list, and this site prints it wherever its list is used. Our list is ENABLE, a public domain list, and it is not the official NASPA or Collins tournament list. Two of the most famous two-letter words in tournament play, QI and ZA, are not in ENABLE, so they are not in our trainer. A few words in our list aren't legal in rated play either. If rated games are your world, learn from the official list for your event. For friendly games and practice, the week below will do its job.

The five minute plan

Day one, the A group. Day two, E, I, and O. Day three, the letters that start the most words on a board, B, D, G, H, M, P, and T among them. Day four, the awkward ones, J, K, Q, V, X, and Z, which are short lists and the ones worth the most when they come up. Day five, test yourself against the full set and mark the ones you missed. Day six, the missed ones only. Day seven, one more full pass, out loud if you can stand it. Five minutes a day, and most of it is the testing, because trying to recall a word fixes it in memory far better than reading it does. By the end most people hold eighty or ninety of the set without effort, and the rest come within another week of ordinary play.

Spend them well

Knowing the list changes what you look for. With a full set in your head you start seeing the parallel play, where your word runs beside an existing one and every touching tile has to spell something, which is only possible when you know the small words those touches must form. You also start hoarding less. Players who don't know the two-letter words keep tiles back hoping for length. Players who do know them spend bad tiles early and cheap, and their racks stay balanced because of it.

Drill the week in the trainer

The Pangramist two-letter trainer runs exactly this plan. It goes letter group by letter group, it tests instead of just showing, and it keeps the ones you miss and brings them back on day six the way the plan asks. Start with the A group now. Five minutes, and the board will look different by Friday.

Open the two-letter trainer