The Most Common Word Endings in English

The 15 biggest word endings, counted

Suffixes are the engine of English vocabulary. We counted how many words in our 359,039-word dictionary end with each of the 15 most productive suffixes:

-ED and -ING are a fifth of everything

The two verb endings alone — -ED (22,223) and -ING (17,845) — cover 40,068 words, roughly 11% of the dictionary. Add -LY (15,012) and -ER (14,949) and you are near one word in five ending in just four patterns.

This is the single most useful pattern fact in word games: if you are stuck on a rack or a puzzle slot, testing these four endings first covers the largest share of the language for the least effort.

Reading the long tail

• -NESS (7,782) beats -MENT (1,777) four to one. When you need to extend an adjective, -NESS is statistically the better bet.
• -TION (6,351) is the crossword classic — four letters that finish thousands of longer words, which is why constructors lean on it.
• -FUL is rarer than it feels (1,025). It is common in speech but scarce in the dictionary; don't hold tiles waiting for it.

Every ending in the table links to its full word list, and the Words Ending With hub covers every letter and pattern. For strategy on turning these patterns into points, see our Scrabble strategy guide.