Comparing word finder sites
This comparison is no longer maintained. It was built on traffic rankings from Alexa Internet, a service that has since been shut down. We do not have that data any more and there is no equivalent source we would trust, so rather than publish numbers we cannot stand behind, we have removed them.
The original page ranked word game sites by how much traffic they received. What follows is the part of it that is still worth saying.
Why we compared at all
There are a lot of word finders, and most of them answer the same question with the same word lists. Popularity was a rough way of asking which ones people actually came back to. It was never a measure of whether the answers were right.
What to look at instead
If you are deciding which tool to rely on, these are checkable without trusting anyone's traffic figures:
- Which word lists does it check, and does it say so? A finder that does not tell you which list a word came from cannot tell you whether your opponent can challenge it. Ours checks four and shows each one separately — see which dictionary applies where.
- Does it handle blanks honestly? A blank scores zero. A tool that shows the same score whether or not you used a blank is giving you a number you cannot act on.
- Can you tell when it is broken? If the dictionary fails to load and the page says "no words found", you have been told something false. Our finder says it could not search, which is a different statement.
- How current is the word list? Word lists get revised. Each of ours has its own page showing when we last checked it against the source — for example Collins.
Those are the things that decide whether a word finder helps you win, and none of them have anything to do with how many people visit it.
Four tests you can run on any word finder in two minutes
Including this one. None of them need special knowledge, and each has a right answer.
| Test | What to do | What a good answer looks like |
|---|---|---|
| Dictionary honesty | Look up ZO | Valid in Collins, not in the North American lists — and the tool should say which, not just “valid” |
| Blank arithmetic | Search seven letters, then the same six letters plus a blank | The words containing the blank score less, and the tool shows which letter the blank covered |
| Nonsense | Look up xqzptv | A clear no. A tool that returns something has a matching problem, not a dictionary |
| Freshness | Find the edition and the date of the word list | It is stated somewhere. On most sites it is not stated anywhere at all |
The fourth is the one that separates tools, and it is the one nobody advertises. A list without an edition and a date behind it is a claim with no evidence — the current editions and who publishes them are set out in which dictionary Scrabble uses.
Common questions
What happened to Alexa? Amazon shut the service down in 2022. Its traffic rankings were estimates from browser-toolbar data even while it ran, and nothing has replaced them with anything more reliable that is also public.
Is a more popular word finder a better one? Not measurably. Popularity tracks marketing and age of domain far more than it tracks whether the answers are right or the word list is current.
Why keep this page at all? The address has been indexed for years, and people still open it. Deleting it would lose the visit; redirecting it would answer a different question than the one they asked. Saying plainly what the page used to be, and what is worth asking instead, is the honest version.