Word Game Dictionaries Compared

Every word-game player eventually has the argument. You play a word you know is real, and the game refuses it. Or your opponent plays something that looks invented, and it scores. Usually nobody is wrong: different games use different word lists, and those lists disagree far more than most people realise.

This article compares the lists behind the most popular word games, using the same files our tools search. The numbers describe the editions we use; official lists are updated every few years, so the newest editions add a few thousand words.

The big three lists at a glance

All three agree on 167,942 words. The disagreements are where the arguments start.

TWL06: the North American tournament list

TWL stands for Tournament Word List. TWL06 was the official list for club and tournament Scrabble in North America for years and is still the default in many word tools, including our Scrabble word finder. Its successor, the NASPA Word List, adds newer words. The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary used at home is closely related but leaves out offensive words.

TWL is not as American as people assume. It accepts British spellings such as COLOUR and REALISE alongside COLOR and REALIZE, because both are legitimate English.

Collins: everything TWL has, and much more

Collins Scrabble Words, often called SOWPODS after the two lists it originally merged, is used in the UK, Australia, much of Africa and Asia and at the World Scrabble Championship. In our files, every one of the 178,691 TWL06 words is also in Collins, and Collins adds 89,061 more.

Those extras include British, Australian and South African words, dialect, older spellings and a lot of informal vocabulary. Some short ones Collins players use constantly:

• Two letters: CH, DA, DI, EA, EE, FY, GI, GU, IO, JA, KO, KY, NY, OB, OO, OU, PO, ST, TE, UG, UR, YU and ZO, 23 two-letter words in all that TWL06 does not allow
• Modern or informal: BLING, GINORMOUS, GOOGLE, TEXTED and EMO are Collins-only in the editions we use

If you learned Scrabble in North America and play an international opponent, expect to see plays you would have challenged at home.

ENABLE and Words With Friends

ENABLE is a free, public-domain word list created for word-game software. Words With Friends was built on it, and Zynga has since edited the game's list on its own: adding slang, removing offensive words and occasionally fixing errors. That means ENABLE is a good guide to what WWF accepts, but not a perfect one.

The biggest practical difference from TWL06 is at the short end. ENABLE has no QI, ZA, FE, KI or OI, so five two-letter words that Scrabble players rely on are missing. It also lacks thousands of newer words that TWL06 picked up, among them ABAYA, AGITA, AHI, APP, BENTO, BLOG and GAYDAR. In the other direction, ENABLE has 4,824 words that TWL06 does not, but almost all of them (4,215) are longer than 15 letters. TWL06 stops at 15 because that is the width of a Scrabble board.

Wordle: two lists in one

Wordle works differently from board games. It has a list of words it will accept as guesses (12,972 in the original game) and a much shorter list of words it will choose as answers (2,315). The answer list is made of familiar words, and it contains almost no plurals ending in S.

The guess list is generous and includes plenty of obscure words, which is why strategy tools sometimes recommend openers you have never heard of. Neither list lines up neatly with the Scrabble dictionaries: 507 accepted Wordle guesses are not in any of the English lists we use, and two of the original answers, ADMIN and INBOX, are not in TWL06.

Our Wordle solver uses the answer list to rank possibilities, so the words it suggests are ones that can actually turn up.

Hand-picked lists: Spelling Bee, Letter Boxed and friends

Daily puzzles from newspapers and apps usually do not use a tournament list at all. Their editors keep curated lists designed to feel fair to a general audience. Typically they:

• leave out obscure and archaic words that only word-game specialists know
• remove offensive and many vulgar words
• exclude proper nouns, abbreviations and hyphenated words
• add new everyday words faster than tournament lists do

This is why a Scrabble player can type a perfectly valid word into the Spelling Bee and see it rejected, and why the same puzzle sometimes accepts a recent coinage no tournament list includes. Our Spelling Bee solver and Letter Boxed solver offer a common-words filter for this reason: it brings their results much closer to what curated puzzles accept.

Words that surprise people

A few results from our lists that tend to start conversations:

• IRREGARDLESS is valid in TWL06, Collins and ENABLE. Usage guides frown on it, but word lists record words that exist, not words that are approved.
• OK, EW and ZEN are not in any of the editions we use. Newer official lists have added OK and EW, which is a good reminder that lists change.
• ZZZ is valid in TWL06 and Collins, though it is not in ENABLE.
• YOUS (a plural of "you") is valid in TWL06 and Collins.

So which list is "right"?

Each list is right for its own game. If you play in a club or online tournament in North America, the NASPA list (TWL's successor) is the authority. Internationally, Collins is. In Words With Friends, the app's own dictionary decides, and in a daily puzzle, the editor does.

The useful habit is to know which list your game uses and set your tools to match. In our word unscrambler and other finders, the dictionary menu lets you switch between TWL06, Collins, ENABLE and our combined English list. For a deeper look at the two most popular board games, see Scrabble vs Words With Friends, and for the short words that differ most between lists, read our guide to two-letter Scrabble words.