How it works
This page explains where the words come from, what the commonness tiers and scores mean, and how the word lists are generated. Everything described here is computed at build time from public data; nothing is typed by hand except the intros to the curated lists.
The dictionary
The master word list is ENABLE (Enhanced North American Benchmark Lexicon), a list of about 172,000 English words that its authors formally released into the public domain. We keep the words of two to fifteen letters made only of the letters A to Z, which leaves 168,551 words. Proper nouns, hyphenated words, abbreviations and words with apostrophes are not included. ENABLE is the list most word-game helpers use, but it is not the official dictionary of any particular game, so a word that appears here may still be rejected by a game with a different list, and vice versa. We do not use, and will not add, the proprietary tournament word lists.
Commonness tiers
Each word is tagged very common, common or rare using the size levels from SCOWL (Spell Checker Oriented Word Lists). SCOWL groups words into levels from 10 to 95; a word at level 35 or below is tagged very common, one at level 60 or below is tagged common, and everything else is rare. Level 60 is SCOWL's own recommended cut-off for a spell checker, which makes it a sensible definition of "a word most people would recognise". Very common words carry a small dot in the results, and the "common only" filter hides the rare tier. If SCOWL data were ever unavailable at build time, every word would be tagged rare and the filter would disappear rather than the site breaking.
Scores
A word's score is the sum of the values of its letters. Two value sets are offered: the classic set used by the traditional crossword board game, and the set used by the most popular mobile tile game. Blank tiles score zero. Board multipliers such as double-letter and triple-word squares are ignored because the tools do not know where a word will be placed. Scoring also ignores tile inventory: a real set contains only one Z, so a word such as JAZZ can only be played with a blank, but the tools score both Zs at full value.
| Letter | Classic | Alternative | Letter | Classic | Alternative |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| A | 1 | 1 | N | 1 | 2 |
| B | 3 | 4 | O | 1 | 1 |
| C | 3 | 4 | P | 3 | 4 |
| D | 2 | 2 | Q | 10 | 10 |
| E | 1 | 1 | R | 1 | 1 |
| F | 4 | 4 | S | 1 | 1 |
| G | 2 | 3 | T | 1 | 1 |
| H | 4 | 3 | U | 1 | 2 |
| I | 1 | 1 | V | 4 | 5 |
| J | 8 | 10 | W | 4 | 4 |
| K | 5 | 5 | X | 8 | 8 |
| L | 1 | 2 | Y | 4 | 3 |
| M | 3 | 4 | Z | 10 | 10 |
The solver
When you search, the tool counts the letters you entered and compares them with the letters in each candidate word. A word matches if every letter it needs is available, with blanks covering any shortfall. The letters supplied by a blank are underlined in the results. The word data is split into one small file per word length, so a query only downloads the lengths it can produce, and the search itself runs in your browser in a few milliseconds. Results are sorted by length, then score, then alphabetically; other orders are available in the filters.
Definitions
Definitions come from Open English WordNet. We show the first sense and its part of speech only, so a word with many meanings displays just one. Definitions appear on list pages for the most common words and in the sections beneath the results; they are not available for every word.
The word lists
Every list page is generated from the dictionary at build time: the count, the tiers, the top scorers and the words themselves are all computed. Lists that would contain fewer than a handful of words are not generated at all, so there are no empty pages. The site currently has 9,064 pages. Unscramble pages exist for a few thousand common four- to seven-letter words chosen for how many sub-words they contain; for any other rack, the unscrambler tool gives the same answer on demand.
Attributions and licences
- ENABLE word list, compiled by Alan Beale and others: released into the public domain.
- SCOWL (Spell Checker Oriented Word Lists), copyright 2000-2018 Kevin Atkinson, used under its MIT-like licence. Permission to use, copy, modify, distribute and sell these word lists and their output is granted provided the copyright notice appears in all copies. The full notice is included in the site's source repository.
- Open English WordNet, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0). Definitions from WordNet.
- Tile values are facts about the games and are not subject to copyright.
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