Methodology

The lexicon

Every word on this site comes from ENABLE — the Enhanced North American Benchmark Lexicon, 172,823 words, released into the public domain by Alan Beale. It is the list this site can publish in full and lawfully, and naming it is the point: you can check our answers against the same source we used.

Why not the "official" lists

The tournament lists — TWL/OWL in North America, Collins (SOWPODS) elsewhere — are copyrighted compilations owned by game publishers. A free website cannot lawfully republish them. Sites that imply they are checking against an official list are either using a public-domain list anyway, or infringing. We use ENABLE and say so. The overlap is very large; a small number of words differ.

Words you will notice are missing

ENABLE was compiled in 1997. The tournament lists have since added a run of very short, very useful words — QI, ZA, ZO, KI and others — and those additions are inside a copyrighted compilation, so a freely publishable lexicon cannot carry them.

If you searched for one of those and found nothing, that is why: not a bug, and not a claim that the word is invalid in your game. It is the honest edge of a public-domain list, and it is the trade for a site that can tell you exactly what it is built on.

Scores

Computed from the standard tile values (A, E, I, L, N, O, R, S, T, U = 1; D, G = 2; B, C, M, P = 3; F, H, V, W, Y = 4; K = 5; J, X = 8; Q, Z = 10). Board bonuses are not included, because they depend on where you place a word rather than on the word.

What is deliberately not built

There is no page for all 172,823 words, and no page for every letter combination. Most would be a heading above three obscure entries — thin pages that help nobody and, generated at scale, make a site look like it is farming search results rather than answering questions. Pages exist where the list is real: at least ten words for a length-and-letter cut, at least five for the five-letter grid. The solver covers everything else, instantly.

On definitions

None are published. Automatically generated definitions for obscure lexicon entries are frequently wrong, and a wrong definition presented confidently is worse than no definition. Use a dictionary for meaning; use this for whether a word is playable and what it scores.

SOURCE·ENABLE (Enhanced North American Benchmark Lexicon)·Public domain. 172,823 words. Tournament lists (TWL, Collins) are copyrighted and not used.·REVIEWED AUG 2026

SOURCE·ENABLE public-domain lexicon (172,823 words)·lists and scores computed from the lexicon, see method·REVIEWED AUG 2026