Scrabble word lists
Strong players do not learn words at random. They learn them in groups — all the twos, all the words with a Q and no U, everything ending in -ING. A list is a study unit, and it sticks better than isolated words.
By length
Short words come first, because they are the ones you place in tight spaces and use to play parallel to existing words.
- All two letter words — the single most useful list in the game.
- Three letter words — the next tier, and where most of the growth is.
By pattern
The word finder takes a pattern where each underscore stands for one unknown letter. Combined with the starts, ends and contains filters, that covers most of the lists you would want to build:
- Words containing a specific letter — put it in the contains field.
- Words with a given ending — the ends with field. Useful for the suffixes that turn one word into another: -S, -ED, -ER, -ING, -LY.
- Words of an exact shape — the pattern field.
q _ _ _ _gives five letter words starting with Q.
The lists worth building first
| List | Why it pays |
|---|---|
| Two letter words | Parallel plays; scoring several words in one move |
| Three letter words | Fitting into gaps; extending twos |
| Q without U | Turns a stuck tile into a playable one |
| Words with J, X, Z | High value tiles you can place instead of holding |
| Vowel heavy words | Clears a rack that has drawn badly |
Ready-made lists you can open right now
Every one of these is a live search, not a static page — the results follow whichever dictionaries you have switched on.
- Two letter words — the whole set, scored.
- Vowel-heavy words — what to play when the rack is all vowels.
- Two letter words with dictionary columns — the same list, but showing which of the four lists accepts each word.
- Any shape at all — five letters with S in the middle, seven letters ending in -ING, and so on.
For combinations that need a letter present and another one absent, the advanced panel of the word finder has both fields — Contains and Excludes — and they work together. The lists people ask for most often are already built:
- Words with Q and no U — the list that rescues a stuck Q, with points and the dictionaries that accept each one.
- Words with no vowels — for the rack that drew nothing but consonants.
- Vowel-heavy words — for the opposite problem.
Who owns the word lists themselves
A list is only as good as the dictionary behind it, and those dictionaries have owners. Worth knowing before you trust a list you found somewhere:
| List | Owner | Where the original is |
|---|---|---|
| Collins Scrabble Words (CSW) | HarperCollins | The Collins book, plus a free single-word checker at scrabble.collinsdictionary.com |
| NASPA Word List (NWL / TWL) | NASPA | scrabbleplayers.org — members-only book, and the only one of the four with a documented licence for developers |
| Official Scrabble Players Dictionary (OSPD) | Merriam-Webster | A printed book, seventh edition. There is no OSPD API |
| Words with Friends | Zynga | Nowhere public — the game itself is the only checker. Its ancestor, the ENABLE list, is public domain |
None of the first three can be downloaded and reused freely: they are copyrighted data, not public property. That is why word lists on different sites disagree with each other, and why the article on which dictionary applies where is worth ten minutes before you memorise anything.
How to actually memorise one
Reading a list does almost nothing. What works is being asked and getting it wrong, which is why both of our trainers work the same way: they show a word, you say valid or not, and they tell you immediately.
- Two letter words trainer — start here. It is a short list and the payoff is immediate.
- Three letter words trainer — longer, and best taken in small blocks rather than in one sitting.
Ten minutes a day beats an hour on Sunday, because the thing you are training is recognition speed at the board, not knowledge. You do not need to be able to recite the twos; you need to see a gap and know instantly whether XU fits it.
Which lists pay, and which are a waste of a month
| List | Effort | Return |
|---|---|---|
| Two letter words | An evening | Very high — used every game |
| Three letter words | A few weeks | High |
| Q without U | An hour | High for the size — a dozen words that rescue a stuck tile |
| Vowel dumps and no-vowel words | An hour | Fixes the two worst rack types |
| Bingo stems | Ongoing | Medium, and only after the shorts are solid |
| Long obscure words | Months | Low — they almost never fit the board |
The order matters more than the content. Players who start with long words tend to give up; players who start with the twos see their score change within a few games.
Checking a list against the right dictionary
Before you memorise anything, make sure it is valid where you play. A word can be in Collins and not in the North American lists, and roughly a quarter of everything we hold is in Collins only. Every word page shows all four lists side by side, and the finder lets you switch lists off so you only see what counts in your game.
This is also the reason to build lists from a tool that answers per list rather than copying one from a forum post. A list with no dictionary attached to it is a list you will have to unlearn — see which dictionary applies where.