Word Sources and Data

The solver dictionary — ENABLE

Every solver, word list and game on this site searches ENABLE, the Enhanced North American Benchmark Lexicon. It is a list of 172,749 English words released into the public domain by Alan Beale, and it is the basis of a large share of the free word-game tooling that exists.

Licence: public domain. No attribution required, though it is given here because knowing which list a tool uses genuinely changes how you should read its results.

What is in it

Common English words and their inflected forms — plurals, tenses, comparatives. Enough coverage that a solver is not embarrassing.

What is not

Proper nouns. No people, places, brands, films or bands.
Abbreviations and acronyms.
Hyphenated compounds and multi-word phrases.
Recent coinages. The list predates most internet-era vocabulary.

The first two matter most for crosswords, which lean on names and abbreviations heavily. If a pattern with several known letters returns nothing, a proper noun is the likeliest explanation.

Words removed

A short list of ethnic and homophobic slurs and the hardest profanity, as exact forms. Deliberately narrow: an early version ran a general blocklist through a stemmer and silently deleted butter, spices, escort and snatch, which is precisely the "the tool does not know that word" failure the dictionary exists to prevent. So: no stemming, no pattern matching, exact forms only.

How it is split

The lexicon ships as one file per word length. A seven-letter crossword lookup fetches about 35KB rather than the full 2MB, and an anagram of six letters never downloads words longer than six.

Word length	Words
2 letters	96
3 letters	970
4 letters	3,892
5 letters	8,624
6 letters	15,222
7 letters	23,097
8 letters	28,411
9 letters	24,868
10 letters	20,297
11 letters	15,501
12 letters	11,355
13 letters	7,825
14 letters	5,127
15 letters	7,464
Total	172,749

Crossword clues — Webster 1913

The clue search and the clues in our mini crossword are definitions taken from Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary of 1913, which is out of copyright.

The index holds 66,915 definitions covering 37,395 answers — every one of which is also a valid word in the solver dictionary, so nothing it returns is unusable in a grid.

Licence: public domain.

What this is not: an archive of clues from published crosswords. Those are written by named editors and belong to the papers that printed them. A definition index does much of the same work — most standard crossword clues are a definition, sometimes dressed up — without republishing anyone's editorial output.

What it costs: a 1913 dictionary knows nothing about anything after 1913, and contains no proper nouns at all. It is strong on ordinary and slightly archaic vocabulary — which happens to be the register crossword setters live in — and useless on pop culture.

Word frequency

The "most common words" strips on the word-list pages, the answer pool for the games, and the word choice in the generated crosswords are all ranked by a frequency list derived from a large corpus of written English. It is used only for ordering and selection; no word's inclusion in the site depends on it.

Tile values

The Scrabble, Words With Friends and Wordfeud tile values used by the scored finders are the face values printed on the physical tiles — plain facts about how each game scores a letter. They are not drawn from any licensed word list, and each scored page shows the table it used so you can check the arithmetic.

Why any of this matters

Two tools can disagree about whether a word is real, and the reason is almost always that they are searching different lists. Knowing which list sits behind an answer tells you how much weight to put on it — so Word Puzzle Kit states its sources rather than presenting results as if they came from nowhere.

The practical version: read a match here as "this is an English word", not "this will be accepted by the game you are playing". For anything that decides a game, check that game's own dictionary.

Common questions

Is ENABLE the same as the official Scrabble dictionary?

No. Official tournament lists — TWL and NWL in North America, Collins elsewhere — are separately maintained and licensed. ENABLE overlaps heavily with them and is not identical, particularly around two-letter words, recent additions and dialect spellings.

Why does the dictionary not have proper nouns?

Because ENABLE is a lexicon of common English words and their inflections. No names, places, brands or abbreviations. That is the right shape for a word game and a real limitation for crosswords, which use proper nouns constantly.

Why are the crossword clues written in old-fashioned English?

Because they are definitions from a dictionary published in 1913, which is what makes them free to use. It covers ordinary vocabulary well and contains nothing coined in the last century.

Have any words been removed?

A short list of slurs and the hardest profanity, as exact forms only. No stemming and no automated blocklist — those reliably delete ordinary words and leave a solver that cannot find "escort" or "spices", which defeats the point.