Credits & Licences

ENABLE — which strings count as words

Every word our tools accept comes from the ENABLE word list (Enhanced North American Benchmark LExicon), compiled by Alan Beale and M. Cooper. It holds 172,823 words, of which168,327 are published here after filtering to lengths of 2 to 15 letters and removing offensive terms.

ENABLE was formally released into the public domain. Its authors asked only that users mention the source and credit them as originators, which is what this section does:

The ENABLE master word list, WORD.LST, is herewith formally released into the Public Domain. Anyone is free to use it or distribute it in any manner they see fit. No fee or registration is required for its use nor are "contributions" solicited […] Game designers may feel free to incorporate the WORD.LST into their games. Please mention the source and credit us as originators of the list.

SCOWL — how common each word is

Result ranking and the "common words only" filter use size levels fromSCOWL (Spell Checker Oriented Word Lists), release 2020.12.07, by Kevin Atkinson. Its licence requires that the following notice travels with any word list derived from it, so here it is in full:

The collective work is Copyright 2000-2018 by Kevin Atkinson as well as any of the copyrights mentioned below:

Copyright 2000-2018 by Kevin Atkinson

Permission to use, copy, modify, distribute and sell these word lists, the associated scripts, the output created from the scripts, and its documentation for any purpose is hereby granted without fee, provided that the above copyright notice appears in all copies and that both that copyright notice and this permission notice appear in supporting documentation. Kevin Atkinson makes no representations about the suitability of this array for any purpose. It is provided "as is" without express or implied warranty.

We use SCOWL size levels 10 to 80 only. Levels above 80 and the Australian English lists carry additional copyrights, so they are deliberately excluded.

LDNOOBW — keeping the lists family-friendly

Offensive terms are removed from every published word list using theList of Dirty, Naughty, Obscene and Otherwise Bad Wordsmaintained by Shutterstock, used under theCreative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence, plus a short list we maintain ourselves. No changes were made to the original list; we use it as a filter rather than redistributing it.

Figtree — the typeface on our share cards

The social preview images are set in Figtree by Erik D. Kennedy, used under theSIL Open Font License 1.1. The font is used only when those images are generated; it is not served to your browser, and the site itself uses whatever sans-serif your system already provides.

Software

The site is built with Astro,React andTailwind CSS, and runs on Cloudflare Workers. All of these are open source.

What we deliberately do not use

No official game dictionary is used anywhere on this site. That means no Collins or SOWPODS list, no NWL, TWL or OTCWL list, and no answer list from any published puzzle. Those are proprietary. It also means a word our tools accept may be rejected by a particular game, and the reverse.

Tile point values for Scrabble and Words With Friends are game mechanics — the numbers printed on the tiles — rather than dictionary content, and are not taken from any proprietary list.

Trademarks

Wordle is a trademark of The New York Times Company. Scrabble is a trademark of Hasbro in the United States and Canada and of Mattel elsewhere. Words With Friends is a trademark of Zynga. These names are used here only to describe what our tools help with. This site is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by any of them.