alien

The filled squares are the 3 vowels — 3 of 5 letters. In the size-ranked list, alien sits in the everyday tier.

Letters

58,636 words share the length

Syllables

3stress on the first

Anagrams

4aline, anile

One letter away

1align

• adjectivenot contained in or deriving from the essential nature of something
• adjectivebeing or from or characteristic of another place or part of the world
• nouna person who comes from a foreign country; someone who does not owe allegiance to your country

The CMU Pronouncing Dictionary reads it as ey1 l iy0 ah0 n — 3 syllables, the stress on syllable 1.

1 words share everything from the last stressed vowel on — that is what counts as a rhyme here.

• mammalian

4 other words use exactly these letters: aline, anile, liane, elain.

• align

Same length, one position changed. <1% of the 8,636 words this long are a neighbour.

• 5 letter words8,636
• Starts A10,456
• Starts AL969
• Ends N
• 5 letters starting A

Tier: everyday. The tiers come from the English Speller Database and rank by list size, not by how often a word is used — see where the words come from.