Where the words come from
Four datasets, all of them public domain or openly licensed, all pinned by checksum so a number this site has published cannot change quietly.
- Words
- 172,8232 to 28 letters
- Everyday tier
- 38,55422% of the list
- With a pronunciation
- 50,962
- Retrieved
- 2026-09-28
The datasets
| Dataset | What it gives | Licence | SHA-256 |
|---|---|---|---|
| ENABLE word list | Every word this site knows | Public domain | 3f16130220645692… |
| SCOWL / English Speller Database, size tiers 35 · 60 · 80 | How common a word is | Permissive — use, copy, modify, distribute and sell | 3b0c2a2d20c4711f… |
| CMU Pronouncing Dictionary | Syllables, stress and rhymes | BSD-2-Clause | 81917843c7f44ce2… |
| Open English WordNet 2024 | Definitions | CC BY 4.0 | e1f633b0a93758ca… |
What this site does not have
A tournament word list. The dictionaries used to settle club and tournament games are the property of their publishers. We do not license them, we will not copy them, and this site will never claim that a word is "valid" in a game whose list it does not hold. That cuts both ways and it is worth saying plainly: a word that scores in a club game can be missing here, and a word here can be missing from a club list.
Everything on this site is the public-domain ENABLE list instead — 172,823 words, released with the sentence "anyone is free to use it or distribute it in any manner they see fit". It is a large, ordinary English word list. It is not an authority on anybody's game.
A frequency count. The tiers here come from the English Speller Database, which sorts words by how large a spelling list has to be before it includes them. "Everyday" means the smallest list already has it. It does not mean the word is used more often than the next one, and this site never says it does.
Definitions of every word. Open English WordNet defines lemmas. 4,010 of the 5,821 word pages carry a definition of their own; the rest name the nearest lemma the dictionary does define, found by stripping one regular ending — the endings tried are ies, ied, ier, iest, ing, ed, est, er, ly, es, s, with the usual doubled-consonant and dropped-e variants, and the first candidate that is itself a defined word wins. When none is, the page says so and prints nothing.
Other languages. English only, and that is a decision rather than a gap. The Spanish and Portuguese word lists a second edition would need are under GPL, LGPL, MPL or a share-alike licence, and none of those fits here. Until a public-domain lexicon of the right size exists, there is no second language.
Which pages exist, and why those
A word gets a page of its own when it is in the everyday tier and no longer than 5 letters — 5,821 words today. An anagram set gets one when it spells at least 2 words and at least 2 of them are everyday, from words of up to 10 letters — 2,102 sets. Openings and endings of two letters need 40 words, of three letters 200; sequences need 200; a length-and-letter page needs ten.
Those bars are not editorial taste. The host allows 20,000 files in one deployment, so every bar is a lever on that budget, and every one of them is a number in site.config.ts that goes up as the site grows. When one moves, the counts on this page move with it, because this page is generated from the same file.
How every list is ordered
Everyday words first, then the rest, alphabetical inside each group. One rule, on every list, printed under every list. There are no editor's picks here: a machine has no taste and should not pretend to.
Credit
ENABLE by Alan Beale, M. Cooper and the ENABLE group, public domain. SCOWL and the English Speller Database by Kevin Atkinson. The CMU Pronouncing Dictionary by Carnegie Mellon University, BSD-2-Clause. Open English WordNet, CC BY 4.0 — derived from Princeton WordNet. This site is not affiliated with any of them.