The most common Countdown conundrum suffixes

I was curious what endings show up most often in the conundrum answer list behind this site, so I counted the suffixes in the current Countdown conundrum generator dataset. For each 9-letter conundrum answer, I looked at the last 2, 3, 4, and 5 letters and counted how often each ending appeared.

The dataset used here has 2,833 unique 9-letter conundrum answer words.

Three-letter endings

The most common 3-letter ending is ion, just ahead of ate.

That is a useful little pattern to have in your head when you are staring at a conundrum. If the letters include the right pieces, -ION, -ATE, -ENT, -ITY, and -OUS are all worth testing.

Four-letter endings

At four letters, tion is the standout.

There are some obvious families here: -TION and -SION, -ANCE and -ENCE, plus adjective endings like -ABLE, -LESS, -TIVE, and -IOUS.

Five-letter endings

Five-letter endings are much more spread out. ation is the only one that really jumps out.

The headline is not that most conundrums end in -ATION; they do not. But -ATION is common enough that it is one of the first five-letter chunks I would try to spot.

Two-letter endings

For completeness, these are the most common 2-letter endings:

These are less useful as direct "try this suffix" clues, because two letters are so short. They are more interesting as a hint about why the longer endings above show up: te catches words ending in -ATE, on catches -ION, ty catches -ITY, and so on.

What to do with this

If you want a practical conundrum habit, try pulling out common endings before you try to read the whole scramble as one word.

For example:

• if you see I, O, and N, try setting aside ION
• if you see A, T, and E, try ATE
• if you see T, I, O, and N, try TION
• if you see A, T, I, O, and N, try ATION

That will not solve every conundrum, and it can send you down the wrong path. But in this dataset, the common endings are common enough that they are worth checking early.

When the letters are available

Raw frequency is only part of the story. A more useful question for solving is: if the letters for a suffix are available, how often is that suffix actually the ending?

For example, tion appears at the end of 106 answers, which is 3.74% of all 2,833 conundrum answers. But only 263 answers contain the letters T, I, O, and N somewhere. Among those answers, 106 end in -TION, so the conditional chance is 40.30%.

This table only includes suffixes that at least 50 different conundrum answers end with, sorted by the chance that the answer ends with that suffix when the letters are available.

No 5-letter ending appears at the end of at least 50 answers. The closest is ation, which appears at the end of 49 answers. It has a raw chance of 1.73%, and when the letters A, T, I, O, and N are available, the answer ends in -ATION 37.98% of the time.