Words that look right and are not in our list, and why

QI looks right. ZA looks right. Both are short, both score well, and both get played every day in tournament rooms. Our checker says no to both of them, and it is not making a mistake. This guide explains the three honest reasons a word can look right and still be missing from our list, so that when the checker turns down a word you were sure about, you know which reason you are looking at and what you can do about it.

The two famous absences

QI, the vital force in Chinese philosophy, and ZA, the slang word for pizza, are legal plays under the official tournament lists. Neither is in ENABLE, the public domain list every Pangramist tool checks against. The tournament lists gained both words in updates published years after ENABLE was compiled in the late nineties, and a frozen list cannot gain words on its own. That single fact explains most of the missing words players ever notice, and it is reason one of three.

Reason one: the source never had it

Our list is a snapshot. English kept moving after the snapshot was taken, and so did the official lists, which are revised and reissued by their owners. Words that entered wide use later, words that were slang first and dictionary entries second, and older words that a later revision chose to add are all missing here for the same dull reason: they were not in the file. There is no judgement in it and no way to argue with it. The list is what it is, and this site says so on the methodology page rather than quietly patching the holes.

One group inside this reason surprises people. Some words are missing because the list holds a different spelling of the same word. English borrowings often arrive with two spellings, the compilers picked one, and the one in your head is the other. The checker cannot guess which word you meant, so check the variant before you conclude the word is absent.

Reason two: it is a name or an abbreviation

Word lists for games hold common words. They do not hold the names of people, places, companies, or teams, and they do not hold abbreviations, however familiar those feel. A word can be printed in every newspaper in the country and still sit outside every game list, ours included, because it is a name. The same goes for shortenings that live in text messages and headlines. If the checker says no to a word you have only ever seen capitalised, or only ever seen with full stops in it, that is usually the whole story. No report will change this one. It is a rule of the form, not an oversight.

Reason three: we removed it on purpose

Our build removes a small set of entries whose main sense is a slur against a protected group. The count is published on the methodology page, the removed words are never printed as a list, and a word removed this way gets the same checker answer as any other absence: not in our list. We know reasonable players disagree about where this line sits. Tournament lists have argued about the same words for years, and some have moved words in and out over exactly this question. Our position is stated rather than hidden, which is all a player can ask of a list they did not compile. If you believe a word near the line was called wrong, the report route below reaches a person who will look at it.

A no is not a verdict on the word

It is worth saying plainly. When our checker rejects a word, it reports on one file, not on the English language. A word can be real, current, printed in good dictionaries, and legal in your game, and still be absent here because of one of the three reasons above. The opposite happens too: our list holds older words the tournament lists have since dropped, so an acceptance here is not a promise anywhere else. The list that governs your game is the list your game names. For rated or tournament play, check the official list for your event. For a home game, the house decides, and this site is content to be the house's reference rather than its referee.

Check it, then report it

Start with the Pangramist word checker. Type the word in and you will get a straight answer about our list, with the standing note about the tournament lists beside the result. If the word still looks wrong to you after that, use the report route beside the checker and send it in. Send one word at a time, with where you met it if you can. A single reported word gets checked against our sources and answered either way, and accepted changes land on the corrections page where everyone can see them. What we cannot use is a pasted list of hundreds of words, because bulk lists almost always trace back to a copyrighted source we are not allowed to build on. One word, checked honestly, is how this list improves.