Letterpress Cheat

How the Letterpress Cheat works

Letterpress shows you a 5×5 grid of letters. On your turn, you spell any word you can from those letters — each one you use changes colour to yours. The goal isn't to score points (there are none); it's to own more squares than your opponent when the board fills up. Type the 25 letters from the board into the box above and we'll list every word you can spell, longest first.

This is a different cheat than the others. In Scrabble or Words With Friends, the question is "what's my highest-scoring play?". In Letterpress, the question is "which play gives me the best tile position for the next few turns?" The finder is a starting point — it tells you what's spellable. The strategy is yours.

Which dictionary Letterpress uses

Letterpress draws from its own internal word list (often called the LADL, the Letterpress App Dictionary List), which is a curated subset built on top of the ENABLE2K dictionary. It's roughly comparable to a relaxed version of the official Scrabble dictionary: it accepts most common words plus a long tail of moderately obscure ones, but rejects very archaic forms and some technical jargon.

Our results above use the NASPA Word List 2023. The two lists overlap in well over 90% of words; most of the time, if it's playable in Letterpress, it's on our list. A handful of Letterpress-accepted words won't appear in NWL (Letterpress is slightly more permissive with prefixed forms like "REPACK", "UNBOLT"), and vice versa.

The capture mechanic in one paragraph

When you play a word, every letter you used becomes "yours" (your colour). On your opponent's next turn, those tiles can still be used in their words — but if they do, the tiles flip back to neutral, not their colour. The only way to lock a tile so it can't change hands again is to fully surround it on all four orthogonal sides with tiles of your colour. Locked tiles are points in the bank.

Why short words often beat long ones

Every letter you use in your word becomes vulnerable for the rest of the game — your opponent can re-use it to take the tile back. The shorter the word, the fewer tiles you expose, and the easier it is to surround and lock what you've already captured. Top Letterpress players often play 4- and 5-letter words even when 8-letter words are available, because the 8-letter word "tags" 8 tiles your opponent can immediately attack.

Strategy: own the right tiles, not the most tiles

The corner-and-edge advantage

Tiles in the corners need only two adjacent tiles to be locked. Tiles along an edge need three. Tiles in the middle need all four. That means corner and edge captures are structurally easier to defend. When the finder gives you a choice between a word that uses central letters and one that uses edge letters, prefer the edges — they convert to locked tiles faster.

Re-using letters within a turn

Letterpress lets you use the same letter multiple times in one word, as long as the letter appears at least once on the board. If the board has one "E", you can still play words like EERIE or PEEPED. This is the single weirdest rule for new players and the most common reason a word fails to appear. The finder above respects this — it shows every word that's spellable given the board's letter set, not its multi-set.

Reading your opponent's threat

Before you commit to a play, scan the board: which of your tiles are exposed (not locked)? Which can your opponent recapture with a common word? If you have an exposed cluster that's one well-chosen word away from being locked, prioritise that play over a flashier-looking long word elsewhere. Defensive locking wins more Letterpress games than offensive grabbing.

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