Quick answer
How many 5-letter words are there in English?
Quick answer
How many 5-letter words are there in English?
There are roughly 12,000 five-letter words in a large English dictionary, though counts vary widely by source because dictionaries differ on inflected forms, proper nouns and archaic spellings. Wordle accepts around 13,000 five-letter words as guesses but draws its daily answers from a curated list of about 2,300 common words.
In more detail
The gap between those two numbers explains a common frustration: a word can be accepted as a guess and still never appear as an answer, because the answer list is deliberately restricted to words most players will recognise.
Counting is genuinely ambiguous. Whether BOXES counts as a separate word from BOX, or whether obsolete spellings belong in the list at all, are editorial decisions, and different dictionaries answer them differently.