How this site works
Most word finders do not tell you where their word list came from, which makes it impossible to know why a word is missing or whether a result can be trusted. This page says exactly what is under the hood, including the parts that are a compromise.
Which dictionary British games use
Worth getting straight first, because it decides what counts as a word. Clubs and tournaments in the UK, and almost everywhere outside North America, play Collins Scrabble Words, still widely called CSW or by its old name SOWPODS. It holds somewhere close to 280,000 words. North America plays a different and smaller list, the NASPA Word List, usually shortened to TWL, at roughly 192,000.
Collins is much the more permissive of the two. A word that passes without comment at a club in Manchester can be challenged straight off the board in Chicago, and that is not a quirk, it is two separate lists maintained by two separate bodies.
Which dictionary this site uses
The base is ENABLE, a word list in the public domain that has been the foundation of word game software for decades. It is the reason this site can exist without licensing anything, and it is why every tool here is free with no account and no limit.
ENABLE is North American in origin, which for a British site raises an obvious question: does it even contain British spellings? We checked properly rather than assuming. Of sixty everyday pairs, from COLOUR and CENTRE through to PYJAMAS, GAOL and MANOEUVRE, fifty-eight were already there. ENABLE turns out to be far less American than its name suggests.
The British spellings we added
The gaps that remained were patchy rather than systematic. COLOUR was present but COLOURFUL was not. METRE was there, KILOMETRE was not. FAVOUR yes, FAVOURITE no. So rather than hand-listing, we derived them, under one rule:
A British spelling is only added when its American form is already in the list. If COLORFUL is valid, COLOURFUL is the same word spelled the British way. If the American form is absent too, the word is simply not in this dictionary and we leave it alone.
That is how real British word lists are derived from American ones, and it means nothing here is invented vocabulary. It added 2,718 words: the -ISE and -ISATION families, -OUR adjectives like COLOURLESS and FLAVOURFUL, -RE measures like MILLIMETRE, the doubled-L verbs such as GROVELLER and CHANNELLER, and the odd one out like FULFILMENT that drops an L instead of gaining one. Total: 171,280 words.
The rule also does the work of keeping nonsense out. Applied carelessly, a script like that turns SIZE into SISE, TREMOR into TREMOUR and the noun CHANGELING into CHANGELLING. Each of those is blocked explicitly and checked on every run.
The two-letter words, and what is still missing
ENABLE was frozen before the 2014 tournament update, which left its two-letter set at 96. We add the eleven that update introduced: DA, EW, FE, GI, KI, OI, OK, PO, QI, TE and ZA. All eleven are valid under Collins as well, and QI and ZA matter most, because between them they turn the two worst tiles in the bag into something playable.
Where we are genuinely short of Collins
Spelling is handled. What we cannot reproduce is Collins-only vocabulary: the dialect, Scots and obscure entries that exist in Collins and in no public-domain list. Two-letter words are the clearest case, where Collins recognises around 127 against our 107.
So treat this as a study aid and a fast way to see what a rack can make, not as a Collins adjudicator. For a word that decides a game, the official Collins list is the only thing that settles it.
Both spellings work, whichever side you are on
This site is written for British players, but a fair share of the people using it are not, and there is no reason they should be second-class. The word list now carries both spellings of everything: COLOUR and COLOR, RECOGNISE and RECOGNIZE, CENTRE and CENTER, DEFENCE and DEFENSE are all valid and all findable.
That is not a compromise, it is how both games actually work. Collins and the North American list each accept both forms, because a spelling variant is still a word. If you unscramble a rack containing C, O, L, O, U and R you will see COLOUR and COLOR side by side, and both are legal plays.
The same applies to the writing. Where a rule genuinely differs between Britain and North America, the page says so rather than picking one and leaving the other reader confused. The clearest case is challenging: under Collins rules an unsuccessful challenge costs you nothing, while North American rules usually cost the challenger their next turn. Both versions are set out on the Scrabble page.
What is British here is the default framing: bonus rather than bingo, Collins named first, and a Countdown solver that most American sites would never think to build. Nothing is hidden from anyone else.
Why we do not simply fill the gap
We could pad the list from memory and quietly claim Collins coverage. Plenty of sites do. We have not, because a solver that shows you a word which does not exist is worse than one that misses a few: the first loses you a challenge, the second only loses you some points.
Adding a British spelling of a word already in the dictionary is safe, because the word was already judged valid by someone else. Inventing vocabulary is not. That line is where we stopped, and if a word you know is missing, this is almost always why.
The definitions
Definitions come from Webster's 1913, which is also public domain. 48,124 of our words have one, which is a little under a third.
They are cleaned up before you see them. Webster runs numbered senses into each other and ends each one with a source citation, so we keep the first sense, drop the citations and bracketed etymology, and trim the result to something that fits under a word in the results grid. Where there is no entry at all, the panel says so rather than showing you an empty box.
Being a 1913 dictionary, the phrasing is occasionally dated and it has nothing to say about words that entered English afterwards. It also predates most of the twentieth century's spelling divergence, so some entries read as neither quite British nor quite American. It is a genuine trade-off we accept in exchange for being able to show definitions at all, which none of the sites we compete with do.
Why the solver runs in your browser
Every other word finder we looked at sends your letters to a server, runs a database query and sends the answer back. We measured them: one takes four seconds to respond to a single search, and the quickest is still over half a second. That delay is per search, every time, and it is the reason those sites feel slow no matter how fast your connection is.
Here the word list is downloaded to your device once, in pieces, and every search after that is a local operation measured in single-digit milliseconds. Three things follow from that:
- The letters you type never leave your device. There is no query to log, so there is nothing for us to store even if we wanted to.
- It keeps working offline. Once the list is cached, a dropped connection does not stop you searching.
- Changing a filter is instant. No round trip means the results update as fast as you can click, which makes exploring a rack genuinely useful rather than tedious.
The cost is the first load. A six-letter search needs about 80 KB of word data, a seven-letter one about 150 KB, and it is cached from then on. We think that is a good trade against half a second on every single search forever.
What this site is for
Word solvers have an obvious use that nobody needs explaining and a better one that gets ignored. Feeding a rack in mid-game to win a match against a friend is not very interesting, and most people do it once and lose interest.
The use that actually sticks is review. Play your turn, then put the rack you were holding into the solver and look at what you did not see. You start noticing the same structures repeatedly: the -IER and -IEST endings, the RE- and UN- prefixes, the two-letter words that let you play parallel, the handful of words where a Q survives without a U. That recognition is what separates a strong player from a competent one, and it comes from looking at your own missed plays rather than from reading word lists.
That is why every result opens a definition in place, why the scores for both games sit on every word, and why the guides are short reference lists rather than padding.
Getting in touch
If a word is missing, a definition reads oddly, or something is broken, we would rather know. The contact page explains how. Corrections to the word list are especially welcome, since that is the part where being wrong matters most.