About our word list

Every tool and list on TileFinch uses one word list of 172,523 words. Here is where they come from and why your game might disagree now and then.

The source: ENABLE

ENABLE (Enhanced North American Benchmark Lexicon) is a list of about 173,000 English words released into the public domain around 2000. It was made for word games, so it includes plurals and verb forms and leaves out proper nouns, abbreviations and hyphenated words. Words With Friends built its original dictionary from it. Our copy has 172,823 words; its SHA-256 checksum is 3f16130220645692ed49c7134e24a18504c2ca55b3c012f7290e3e77c63b1a89.

What we changed

• Added 2 words that are standard in word games today but missing from ENABLE, such as QI and ZA. Each addition has a dictionary source in our records.
• Removed 302 words: slurs and other offensive terms, matched against a public list of offensive words (LDNOOBW) and their plural and verb forms.

Why counts differ between sites

Ask five word finders how many words you can make from RETAINS and you will get five answers. Some use the licensed Scrabble tournament lists, some merge several dictionaries, and some include names or made-up strings. We use one list, say which one, and use it everywhere.

Official Scrabble dictionaries

Tournament Scrabble uses the NASPA Word List in North America and Collins Scrabble Words elsewhere. Both are copyrighted and need a license, so we don't publish them. ENABLE matches them for almost all common words; the differences are mostly rare words and words added in recent years.

Common words

To put everyday words first, we rank words by how often they are used in SUBTLEX-US, a frequency count of American film and TV subtitles. A word marked common is likely to be one you know.

Definitions

Short meanings come from WordNet, a lexical database. 109,517 of our words have one. For plurals and verb forms we show the meaning of the base word, marked “form of”. When no meaning is available we say so instead of guessing.

Missing or wrong word?

Tell us the word and the game you play. We review each request and note changes on this page.