Scrabble Dictionary Checker

Which dictionary this is

ENABLE — the Enhanced North American Benchmark Lexicon — released into the public domain by Alan Beale, plus a small documented supplement of modern short words the base list predates. It is the same list the solver, the word finder and every word list on this site use.

It is not the official Scrabble dictionary. There are two of those, and neither is available to copy: NWL (formerly TWL) is maintained by NASPA and used in North America, and Collins Scrabble Words is used almost everywhere else and is several thousand words larger. Claiming compatibility with either would be a claim we cannot support, so the note beside every result says what it actually is.

Why an approximate list is still useful

Because the words that decide games are not the marginal ones. The value of a solver is finding the parallel play that scores forty points using words you already know, not unearthing a word you would not dare play anyway. Disagreements at the edges rarely change which move is best; when they do, the next move down the list is usually within a few points.

The one place the difference bites is the very short words. Two- and three-letter words are where the official lists have grown most in recent years, and they are also the words that make parallel plays legal. If a play is refused in a real game, a two-letter cross word is the first thing to suspect — the two-letter list is the one worth checking against your own edition.

If a licensed list becomes available

Swapping it in changes one configuration entry and nothing else. The solver, the scorer and every page here read the dictionary through a single interface, and the game configuration already names which lexicon it is checked against — so a licensed North American or international list could be attached per game without touching a line of engine code.