Words Starting With S

S: The Letter That Owns the Dictionary

No letter starts more English words than S. At nearly twenty thousand entries, S-starters outnumber every other letter group by a wide margin — C, its closest competitor, trails by about three thousand. The reason is suffix mechanics: S pluralizes nouns (CAT to CATS), conjugates verbs (RUN to RUNS), and forms possessives. But more relevant for S-starters specifically, the prefixes SUB-, SUPER-, SEMI-, SELF-, and SUR- generate thousands of compound entries. Then there's the massive cluster of words beginning with ST-, SH-, SP-, SC-, and SW-, which between them account for the bulk of S's word count. For crossword solvers, this density is a double-edged sword. Knowing the answer starts with S barely narrows things down. You need the second letter to make real progress.

A fact that matters for Scrabble: S is the most valuable single tile in the bag, not for its 1-point face value but for its hooking power. Adding S to the end of almost any noun or verb on the board gives you that word's full score plus your new word's score. Tournament players call S tiles "blanks that score a point" because they're that flexible. There are four S tiles in a standard Scrabble bag, and experienced players track how many have been played. Second fact: S is the only letter where the two-letter word list is genuinely tiny — just SH and SI in most dictionaries. That's surprising given S's dominance elsewhere, and it means the S tile is less useful for parallel plays than letters like A, O, or E.

Strategy for Scrabble: never waste an S tile on a play that scores fewer than 8-10 points more than your best alternative without it. S is too powerful as a hook to burn on a weak play. Hold it for a turn where you can pluralize a high-value word on the board while simultaneously forming your own word across. That double-scoring pattern is how competitive players extract 30-50 points from a 1-point tile. For the other dictionary giant, see words starting with C. Also explore words starting with R for RE- prefix strategy, and check words starting with A and words starting with E for the vowel-starters that most commonly pair with S prefixes.

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