The dictionary, explained

Where the words come from

The dictionary is built from SCOWL (Spell Checker Oriented Word Lists), an openly licensed word-list project widely used by spell checkers and word-game tools. Rather than compiling a private word list from scratch, this site reuses SCOWL's existing, already-vetted data through the wordlist-english package (MIT licensed), which organizes SCOWL's words by dialect and by how common each word is. The core English word set is combined here, spelling-neutral entries used across every major English dialect, giving a broad, general-purpose vocabulary rather than a narrow, region-specific one.

Why this list is smaller than a general dictionary

The same underlying SCOWL-derived source powers a sibling word-finder tool with a 76,266-word list, built for a rack-based puzzle where almost any word length or letter combination can matter. A Spelling Bee-style puzzle works differently: every valid answer is at least 4 letters long, and can use at most 7 distinct letters (the 6 outer letters plus the mandatory centre letter), because that's the entire alphabet available on the board. A word that needs an 8th distinct letter literally cannot be spelled from any 7-letter puzzle, no matter which 7 letters are chosen.

Filtering the source list down to exactly the words that could ever match some 7-letter puzzle, dropping every word shorter than 4 letters and every word that needs more than 7 distinct letters, shrinks the file from 76,266 words to 47,721 with zero loss of correctness for this specific tool: no word that could ever be a valid answer is removed, and every word that's removed could never have matched anything anyway.

What's in the file, and what's deliberately left out

Every entry passed three checks before being included: lowercase letters A through Z only (no numbers, apostrophes, hyphens, or spaces), a minimum length of 4 letters, and no more than 7 distinct letters used across the whole word (repeated letters are fine and don't count twice toward that limit, so a word like "pizzazz" with only 4 distinct letters passes easily despite being 7 letters long). That means possessives, hyphenated compounds, multi-word phrases, and the shortest 1-to-3-letter words are all excluded by design, not by accident.

A full, combined copy of all 47,721 words is served as a plain, publicly downloadable file at /data/word-list.txt, roughly 385KB. The solver fetches that same file directly (once per visit, cached afterward) rather than maintaining a separate copy, so the list you can download is always exactly the list the tool searches: there's no second, hidden dictionary anywhere on this site.

How common a word has to be to make the list

SCOWL organizes words into frequency bands, from the most commonly used English words down to the most obscure. The source list this tool filters from includes every band up to, but not including, SCOWL's most obscure tier, which is reserved for highly specialized, archaic, or extremely rare words unlikely to ever come up in a real puzzle. That cutoff is a deliberate trade-off: a stricter list would miss some genuinely valid words that puzzle solvers actually encounter, while including the most obscure tier would pad results with words so rare they'd rarely help and would occasionally crowd out a much more plausible answer.

Licensing and reuse

SCOWL's word lists and the wordlist-english package that organizes them are both openly licensed for reuse (SCOWL under its own permissive terms, wordlist-english under the MIT license). This site reuses that existing, already-built data rather than compiling a private word list from scratch, in line with the general principle that a proven, openly licensed data source beats reinventing one. No proprietary or scraped word list is used anywhere on this site. See the privacy page for exactly what this site does and doesn't collect when you use the solver.

How this compares to an official Spelling Bee answer key

It's worth being upfront about the biggest limitation: this is a general English dictionary filtered by length and letter count, not a hand-curated, official answer key for any specific daily puzzle. An official puzzle publisher's accepted-word list is curated by an editorial team and can exclude some perfectly ordinary dictionary words (or, less often, include a proper noun or an unusual term) for reasons specific to that publisher's own house style rather than general usage. The pangram solver's results are a strong starting point for finding candidate words and spotting pangrams quickly, but if a specific answer needs to be verified against one particular puzzle's official rules, treat this list as a research tool rather than a guaranteed match for that publisher's internal list. See the examples page for how the results and scoring are meant to be used in practice.