Countdown solver
Put in the nine letters from the board and this gives you the longest words first, which is the order the round is actually scored in. Useful during the adverts, and rather more useful afterwards for working out what you should have spotted.
- 3 and 4
- The minimum vowels and consonants you must take from the stacks
- 30 seconds
- The clock. This solver answers in about two milliseconds
- Oxford
- Countdown adjudicates on the Oxford Dictionary of English, not Collins
Why a six beats a brilliant nothing
The letters round rewards finishing, not brilliance. A six-letter word is six points in the bag. An eight you never quite assembled is nothing at all, and the clock does not care how close you were.
So the habit worth building is this: the moment you see a word, write it down. Then keep hunting. You have a floor, and everything after that is upside. Most people play it the other way round, hold out for something impressive, and declare four letters at the buzzer.
Write the six down first. Then spend the remaining twenty seconds trying to beat it.
The other half of it is knowing where to look. Nine random letters feel like chaos, but the words hiding in them are almost never exotic. They are ordinary words with an ordinary ending stuck on.
Scan for an ending
-ING, -ERS, -IER, -IEST, -TION, -ABLE, -MENT. If one of those is sitting in your nine, set those letters aside and you have turned a nine-letter problem into a five-letter one.
Then look for a prefix
RE-, UN-, IN-, DIS-, OVER-. Less common than endings in this round, but when one is there it usually pairs with a word you can already see.
Count your vowels
Four vowels among nine letters means roughly two syllables and a word around seven letters. Three vowels means something shorter and more consonant-heavy. It narrows the shape before you try any arrangement.
Say the clusters out loud
English allows a small set of consonant pairs at the start of a word: ST, SP, CH, TH, BR, GR, CL. Muttering through them eliminates wrong starts faster than staring at the letters does.
The last thirty seconds
The conundrum is a different puzzle wearing the same clothes. Nine letters again, thirty seconds again, but this time you know the answer uses every single one of them, and you know it is one word.
That certainty changes the approach completely. In the letters round you are searching a space. In the conundrum you are un-jumbling a specific word that somebody deliberately scrambled, and scrambles have habits. The setter usually breaks the word into two chunks and swaps them, so the answer's second half is often sitting at the front of what you are looking at.
Look for the ending at the start
If the first few letters could be -ING or -TION or -MENT, try them as the tail. That single move solves a surprising share of conundrums outright.
Then do what you do in the letters round
Pull the awkward letter out first. A J, V, K or W narrows things enormously because so few words contain them, and it almost always sits at the start or straight after a vowel.
For the conundrum specifically, the anagram solver is the right tool. It returns only words that use every letter, so anything it gives you at nine letters is the answer.
About the letters round
How does the letters round actually work?
Nine letters, chosen one at a time by the contestant from two stacks: vowels and consonants. You must take at least three vowels and at least four consonants, so the usual pick is four vowels and five consonants, or three and six.
Then thirty seconds on the clock to find the longest word you can. A word scores one point per letter, so a seven-letter word is seven points. Find all nine and it doubles to eighteen, which is why a nine is worth chasing even when an eight is already on your pad.
Which dictionary does Countdown use?
The Oxford Dictionary of English, which is worth knowing because it is neither of the lists used in competitive Scrabble. Collins and the Oxford dictionary disagree in both directions: plenty of short Scrabble staples are not in Oxford at all, and Oxford carries ordinary vocabulary that never made it into a word-game list.
Our word list is a public-domain one, so treat a long result as something to check rather than a guarantee Dictionary Corner will allow it. More on where our list comes from.
Is there a way to get better at the letters round?
Two things do most of the work, and neither is memorising word lists.
First, write down a six as soon as you have one. The classic mistake is spending twenty-five seconds hunting for an eight and declaring nothing. A safe six beats a brilliant nothing.
Second, learn the endings. Most sevens and eights in the letters round are a short stem plus -ING, -IER, -IEST, -ERS, -TION or -ABLE. Once you start looking for the ending first, the rest of the word assembles itself. The ending lists are here.
What should I pick, more vowels or more consonants?
Four vowels and five consonants is the standard choice and it is standard for good reason: it gives the best chance of a balanced set you can actually build with. Three vowels and six consonants produces more high-scoring letters but more unplayable piles.
The one thing worth avoiding is taking your vowels last. If five consonants land badly you are stuck taking whatever the vowel stack gives you, with no room to balance the rack.
Can this solve the Countdown Conundrum?
Yes, and the anagram solver is the better tool for it. The conundrum is a nine-letter anagram rather than a longest-word hunt, so you want only the words that use every letter, which is exactly what the anagram solver returns.
Put the nine scrambled letters in there and anything that comes back at nine letters is your answer.
Does it handle the numbers round?
No. This is a word site, and the numbers game is a different problem entirely. The letters round and the conundrum are what we can help with.