Methodology

Pangramist is an independent site. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated by any game publisher. SCRABBLE is a registered trademark of Hasbro, Inc. in the United States and Canada and of Mattel elsewhere. WORDLE is a trademark of the New York Times Company. WORDS WITH FRIENDS is a trademark of Zynga. Word lists on this site come from ENABLE, a public domain list, not from any official tournament list.

This site helps people play word games. It is not published by, affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by, or operated by Hasbro, Inc., Mattel, Inc., Zynga, Inc., the New York Times Company, NASPA (the North American Scrabble Players Association), HarperCollins, or any other game publisher or tournament body, and nothing on this site suggests otherwise.

SCRABBLE is a registered trademark of Hasbro, Inc. in the United States and Canada and of Mattel in the rest of the world. WORDLE, CONNECTIONS, STRANDS, and SPELLING BEE are trademarks of the New York Times Company. WORDS WITH FRIENDS is a trademark of Zynga, Inc. These names appear on this site only to describe the games the tools can be used with. That use is descriptive. It claims no connection with the owners.

The word list used by every tool on this site is ENABLE (Enhanced North American Benchmark LExicon), formally released into the public domain by its compilers. It is not the NASPA Word List (NWL), not Collins Scrabble Words (CSW), and not the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary. Those lists are copyrighted publications of their respective owners, they are not used here in any form, and for rated or tournament play they are the only authorities. Definitions come from Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913), a public domain work, supplemented by short explanations written for this site. They do not come from any current dictionary.

If you are a trademark or rights owner and you believe a page on this site misuses your mark or your material, write to contact@pangramist.com with the page address and what you believe is wrong. A person reads that mail, and a genuine problem gets fixed.

How the list was built, in numbers. ENABLE was fetched with 172,823 words. This site removed 34 entries whose primary sense is a slur, so the list the tools run on holds 172,789 words. The removal count is published here because the count is part of the method.

Definitions: 45,948 of the shipped words, 26.6 percent, match a headword in Webster's 1913 dictionary and carry its definition, labelled with its year. The rest carry computed facts and, where a definition is missing, a short note written for this site that says so.

SCOWL (Spell Checker Oriented Word Lists), version 2020.12.07, is used only to rank results and to tag common words. It never adds a word to the list and never removes one.

Borderline entries are reviewed by a person. The standing review queue and its outcomes are summarised on the corrections page as decisions land.