The ENABLE word list
All PuzleFix tools and lists use ENABLE, the Enhanced North American Benchmark LExicon, compiled by Alan Beale and M. Cooper. Its authors formally released the master list into the public domain, describing it as a gift to the word-game community and an alternative to official word lists. They ask users to credit them as its originators, which we are glad to do.
- Licence: public domain.
- Original size: about 172,800 words.
- Our copy: 172,747 words, after removing 73 offensive slurs.
- Further reading: the ENABLE readme and licence statement, reproduced in this public archive, and in the documentation of the SCOWL and AGID word-list projects.
What ENABLE includes and leaves out
ENABLE contains lower-case English words of two letters or more, including plurals and verb forms. It leaves out proper nouns, abbreviations, hyphenated words and words with apostrophes. It uses mainly North American spellings, although many British spellings are also present.
Why results can differ from your game
Each game uses its own list. Clubs and tournaments in the UK usually play with Collins Scrabble Words, which is much larger than ENABLE; North American clubs use a different official list. Newer words such as QI and ZA are accepted in current official Scrabble lists but are not in ENABLE. Wordle chooses answers from its own list of familiar words. So a word missing from PuzleFix may still be valid in your game, and a word listed here may not be.
How we test the tools
The tools are tested with an automated test suite that runs against the same word list as the site. The tests check, for example, that:
- the unscrambler never uses a letter more often than it appears, and that LISTEN produces its six full anagrams;
- blanks can stand for any letter but score nothing;
- the Wordle solver gives the same green, yellow and grey colours as the game, including for repeated letters such as in SPEED and EERIE, and that the correct answer always remains in the results;
- the crossword pattern finder only returns words of the right length with the known letters in place;
- the word checker and random word generator only return words from the list.
When a bug is reported and fixed, we add a test for it.
Letter values
Scores shown by our tools use the standard tile values of the English edition of Scrabble. Other games, such as Words With Friends and Wordfeud, use different values.