Our word list, what ENABLE is and what it is not

Every word on Pangramist comes from one list, and this page tells you exactly which list it is. The list is ENABLE, and it holds 172,823 words before our own removals. We removed 34 entries ourselves, each one a word whose main sense is a slur, and the count is printed here and on our methodology page because a word count on this site is a counted thing, not a sales line. If a word is not in that file, our tools will not offer it to you. If it is in the file, they will. Everything below explains where the file came from, what we changed, and where its edges are.

Where the list came from

ENABLE was put together in the 1990s, mainly by Alan Beale and Mendel Cooper, and passed around through the wordlist project run by Kevin Atkinson. It was built for word games and word software at a time when most word lists were locked inside books or sold as products. Its compilers did something unusual with it. They released it into the public domain, in writing, in the file itself: anyone is free to use it or distribute it in any manner they see fit, no fee and no registration required.

That release is the whole reason Pangramist exists in this form. We fetched the list from a clean source that carries the release notice, recorded where it came from and when, and kept the notice with our copy. The credits page names the source. Nobody granted us a licence, because nobody needed to. There is no licence to renew, no terms that can change next year, and no owner who can pull the list out from under the site.

Why a list from the nineties

A fair question. Newer lists exist, and the next sections are honest about what they hold that ours does not. We chose a public domain list from the nineties for three plain reasons.

First, it is free in the legal sense, not just the price sense. We can publish pages built from it, ship it to your browser so the solvers run on your own device, and let you check our work against the same file. Second, it is stable. The list does not change between your games, so a word that worked last month works this month, and a word we say is missing stays missing until we say otherwise on the corrections page. Third, it is big enough for the games people actually play at kitchen tables and on phones. Most of its 172,823 words are words no player will ever draw. The gaps that matter are few, and they are named below rather than hidden.

What we changed

Two things, and only two. We removed the entries whose main sense is a slur against a protected group. The count is the 34 in the first paragraph, it was counted by the build rather than estimated, and we never publish the removed words as a list of their own. A player who checks one of those words gets the same answer as any word we do not hold: not in our list. The report route beside the checker is open if you think we got one wrong.

The second change is not to the words but around them. Definitions on our word pages come from Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary of 1913, which is also public domain, and each definition is labelled with that source and year. A 1913 definition sometimes reads oddly now, so we add a short gloss of our own where the old text would mislead. We never take definitions from a current dictionary.

The famous gaps

Two short words cause most of the arguments, so here they are in the open. QI is not in our list. ZA is not in our list. Both are real words in tournament play, both were added to the official tournament lists years after ENABLE was compiled, and neither was in the source we use. We are not allowed to fix that by borrowing from the tournament lists, and we would not hide it if we could. Our Q without U guide shows the words our list does hold for a stuck Q, and the checker will tell you the truth about QI in one second: not here, legal there.

The gaps run in the other direction too. ENABLE holds older and odder words that the tournament lists have dropped over the years, so a word our checker accepts may still be refused in a rated game. Neither list is a subset of the other. They are cousins, not copies.

How the tournament lists differ

The NASPA Word List, NWL, holds about 192,000 words and is the authority for tournament play in North America. Collins Scrabble Words, CSW, holds about 280,900 words and covers most of the rest of the world. Both are copyrighted publications, maintained and updated by their owners, and sold or licensed as products. We do not use either of them in any form, not as a file, not as a source of extra words, and not as a way to patch our gaps.

Pangramist is not run by NASPA, by Collins, or by any game publisher, and no publisher endorses it. Our list is a public domain snapshot of English as word gamers had it in the late nineties, cleaned in the one way described above. For most home games that is the same list your app or your table has always quietly used. For rated play it is not the authority, and the next sentence is the one that matters most on this page.

For rated or tournament play, check the official list for your event.

Check a word now

Do not take this page's word for any of it. Open the Pangramist word checker, type in the word you are arguing about, and it will tell you plainly whether our list holds it, with this page's disclosure sitting right on the tool where it belongs. Try QI. Try ZA. Then try the word you actually drew.