The word list, explained

Where the words come from

The dictionary is built from SCOWL (Spell Checker Oriented Word Lists), an openly licensed word-list project widely used by spell checkers and word-game tools. Rather than write a new word list from scratch, this site reuses SCOWL's existing, already-vetted data through the wordlist-english package (MIT licensed), which organises SCOWL's words by dialect (a spelling-neutral core plus American, British, Australian, and Canadian variants) and by how common each word is.

Two of those sets were combined here: the spelling-neutral English core, which covers words that are spelled the same way in every major English dialect, and the British-specific set, which adds words that are spelled differently in British and Commonwealth English than in American English.

Why British spelling specifically

New Zealand English follows British spelling conventions almost across the board: colour rather than color, favourite rather than favorite, centre rather than center, organise rather than organize, and so on. A word finder built only on an American word list would quietly reject the correct spelling of common words in a New Zealand crossword or word puzzle, marking a genuinely right answer as "not found" for no better reason than a spelling convention mismatch.

Including the British word set alongside the spelling-neutral core means both forms are available where they exist. Searching a 6-letter word with C in position 1 and N in position 5, for example, will surface both British and American spellings side by side wherever the dictionary contains both.

How common a word has to be to make the list

SCOWL organises words into frequency bands, roughly from the most commonly used English words down to the most obscure. This dictionary includes every band up to, but not including, SCOWL's most obscure tier, which is reserved for highly specialised, archaic, or extremely rare words unlikely to ever be the answer to a crossword clue or a word-game puzzle.

That cutoff was a deliberate trade-off. A smaller, stricter word list would miss some genuinely valid words that crossword setters and Scrabble players actually use. A larger list that includes the most obscure tier would pad the results with words so rare that they'd rarely help and would occasionally return implausible matches ahead of a much more likely answer. The current 76,266-word cutoff aims for the middle: comprehensive enough for real puzzles, without the very longest tail of specialist vocabulary.

What's in the file

Every entry in the list passed the same two checks before being included: lowercase letters A through Z only, with no numbers, apostrophes, hyphens, or spaces, and a length between 3 and 15 letters. That means possessives, hyphenated compounds, and multi-word phrases are excluded, along with 1 and 2-letter words (a deliberate simplification, since 2-letter word validity varies between Scrabble dictionaries and this tool isn't tied to any single official game wordlist). Duplicate entries across the combined source lists were removed, and the final file is sorted alphabetically, one word per line.

A full, combined copy of all 76,266 words lives at /data/word-list.txt as a downloadable reference. The tool itself doesn't fetch that combined file, though: since you always pick one specific word length before searching, it only ever needs the words matching that length, so the data is split into 13 smaller files, one per length from 3 to 15 letters, and only the one matching your current word length is loaded. That keeps every request small (the largest single length, 9 letters, is a little over 100KB) instead of loading all 76,266 words up front whether you need them or not. Either way, the file is fetched once by your browser and then never touches a server again; see the privacy policy for the full detail on what does and doesn't leave your device while you use the tool. If you want to check whether a specific word is included, compare your own tools against this tool's results using the word finder itself, or fetch either file directly and search it.

Licensing and reuse

SCOWL's word lists and the wordlist-english package that organises them are both openly licensed for reuse (SCOWL under its own permissive terms, wordlist-english under the MIT license). This site reuses that existing, already-built data rather than compiling a private word list from scratch, in line with the general principle that a proven, openly licensed data source beats reinventing one. No proprietary or scraped word list is used anywhere on this site.

How this compares to an official Scrabble dictionary

It's worth being upfront about one limitation: this is a general English dictionary, not an official tournament word list like the OSPD (used in North America) or Collins Scrabble Words (used internationally). Official Scrabble dictionaries are curated by specific rules committees and include some short, unusual words (and exclude some perfectly normal ones) for reasons specific to competitive play rather than general usage. The word finder's results are a strong starting point for checking whether a word is plausible, but if a specific play needs to be tournament-legal, cross-check it against whichever official list the game you're playing actually uses. See the examples page for how the Scrabble-score sorting is meant to be used in practice, as a way to compare options rather than as a claim that every result is guaranteed to be an accepted tournament word.