Word lists & methodology

The two built-in word lists

Every suggestion the optimizer returns is checked against a fixed word list that ships with the site. You choose which list to use from the Advanced filters panel. Nothing is fetched from a third-party API at run time, so results are deterministic and work offline once the list is cached.

• Tournament (TWL) — a large North-American-style tournament word list of roughly 170,000 entries covering 2- to 15-letter words. Use this when you want the widest set of legal plays, including obscure tiles-dumping words.
• Everyday — a curated list of about 9,800 common English words. Use this when you want suggestions you would actually recognise and be comfortable defending in a casual game.

Both lists are normalised the same way: uppercased, stripped of anything that is not a letter A–Z, de-duplicated, and grouped by length so the engine can scan only the word lengths that fit your rack. Words shorter than two letters or longer than fifteen are removed.

How a word is judged “playable”

The engine only returns a word when all of the following are true:

1. The word exists in the selected dictionary.
2. It can be built from your rack, where any fixed board letters you have pinned must appear in their exact positions.
3. Every remaining letter is covered by a tile you actually hold — counting duplicates — with blank tiles (?) filling in for any single missing letter.
4. It satisfies any advanced filters you set: length range, required letters, and prefix/suffix.

What the optimizer is — and is not

This is a single-word score maximiser. It answers one focused question: given these tiles and these premium squares, which legal word scores the most points? It is a study and practice aid.

It is not a full-board solver. It does not model a 15×15 grid, cross-words formed against existing tiles, or the letters already on your board beyond the squares you pin. For the reasoning behind each number, see how scoring works, and for premium squares see board multipliers.

Accuracy and word disputes

Official tournament dictionaries are updated periodically and vary between regions (for example TWL in North America versus SOWPODS/Collins internationally). A word that is valid here may not be valid in your specific competition, and vice versa. When money, rankings, or bragging rights are on the line, the adjudication dictionary agreed for your game is always the final authority — not this tool.