Scrabble dictionary

What you get on a word page

• A straight answer: playable or not, in each of the four word lists.
• Points in Scrabble and in Words with Friends, tile by tile.
• Anagrams — the same tiles rearranged into another word.
• Every shorter word you can build from the same letters.
• When the word was added to or removed from a dictionary, once we have tracked a change.

The four word lists we check

• OSPD — Official Scrabble Players Dictionary, used in home play in the USA, Canada and Thailand.
• TWL — Official Tournament and Club Word List, the tournament list for the same countries.
• CSW — Collins Scrabble Words, used almost everywhere else. It is the largest of the four.
• WWF — the word list built into Words with Friends, which differs from all of the above.

“Is it a word” is four questions, not one

A word can be perfectly good English and still be unplayable, and it can be unknown to most speakers and perfectly legal. What decides the point is the list your game runs under, and the four lists disagree with each other often enough that a single yes or no would be misleading. That is why every word page here answers per list rather than in one word: the same word can be valid at your club in Manchester and challenged off the board at a tournament in Boston.

The lists are also revised. Words are added, and occasionally removed — usually because a word turned out to be offensive rather than because it stopped existing. Each list page above shows the edition we hold and when we last checked it against the source, so you can see how fresh the answer is instead of taking it on faith.

When the answer is no

A word that is in none of the four lists still gets a page here, and the page says so plainly instead of showing you an error. That is deliberate: “is X a word” is a real question, and “no, and here is which lists do not have it” is a real answer. What the page will not do is pretend the word is fine.

If a word of yours was rejected mid-game, the usual causes are these, in order of how often they happen: it is valid in Collins but you are playing under the American list; it is a proper noun; it is an abbreviation; it needs a hyphen or an apostrophe, neither of which is a tile. None of those are arguable at the board — but the first one is worth checking before you accept the challenge.

Common questions

Are two-letter words really allowed? Yes, and there are more of them than most players use. They are the single most profitable thing to memorise, because they let you play parallel to a word already on the board and collect every cross-word you make.

Do proper nouns count? No. Names of people, places and brands are out, regardless of how common they are. A handful of former names have entered the lists as ordinary lowercase words, and those are valid — the word page will tell you which case you are in.

What about British and American spellings? Collins accepts both freely. The American lists accept a good deal of British spelling too, but not all of it. If a spelling matters to your game, check the word page: it answers list by list.

Can I get the whole word list? No. Pages here are for looking words up, not for downloading the dictionary, and bulk crawling is rate limited. If you want to explore a part of the list, the word pages link to everything that starts with, ends in, or contains the word you are on.

The word is valid but my game rejected it. Then your game is running a different list or an older edition of one. Words with Friends in particular keeps its own list, which is why it has its own page and its own search here.

Other ways to search

• Scrabble word finder — give it your rack, get every word it can make with points.
• Words with Friends cheat — the same, under WWF tiles and the WWF list.
• Crossword solver — search by shape when you know some of the letters and the length.
• Which dictionary Scrabble uses — the long version of the four lists and how they relate.