Words that start with E

Words that start with E and end on a silent E 711 words

ESCAPE, ENGAGE, EXCHANGE, EMBRACE, EXPLODE, ENDURE, EXTREME, ENCLOSE. Seven hundred and eleven words say the letter at the front and swallow it at the back, which is the shortest way to state what this whole page is about. That final E is not a sound, it is an instruction: it stretches the vowel in front of it, or it keeps a C or a G soft, and taking it away leaves a different word or no word at all. The test is spelling rather than opinion, a consonant and then a final E, so ESCAPEE and EMPLOYEE fall outside it and are counted with the doubled EE further down.

Five letter words starting with E, the same letter at one fixed length

Words that start with E that never use the letter again 2,371 words

EACH, EAR, EARDRUM, EGGPLANT, ELBOW, EXIT, EMPTY, ENVY, EQUAL, EXAM. Two thousand three hundred and seventy one words, 34.6 per cent of the page, spend their E on the first character and never come back to it. That is the figure worth sitting with. This letter turns up inside 117,353 of the 168,551 entries in the dictionary, 69.6 per cent of the lot and more than any other letter reaches, and yet a third of the words it opens are finished with it after one keystroke.