Word Lists

These word lists are useful for puzzle solvers and the like.

• freq-words.txt.gz, freq.txt.gz: Frequently Used Word List
  This list of about 52,000 words is based on Peter Norvig's 300,000 word ngram frequency list, which was built from Google's Web Trillion Word Corpus; this list was filtered to include only "reasonable" words. Each word is accompanied in freq.txt.gz by its frequency of use in the Google corpus; freq-words.txt.gz contains only the words. The file README.freq.md in this distribution contains copyright and license as well as other information, including a detailed description of list construction.

• eowl.txt.gz: The English Open Word List (EOWL)
  This list is compiled by Ken Loge based on the UK Advanced Cryptics Dictionary by J. Ross Beresford. It is reasonably comprehensive, with the significant limitation that it only includes words of 10 or fewer letters. The file README.eowl-official.html in this distribution contains copyright and license as well as other information.

• scowl.txt.gz, scowl-nn.txt.gz: Spell Checker Oriented Word List (SCOWL)
  Kevin Atkinson compiled this list from a variety of sources. The default list here is the "size 60 american" list. The file README.scowl-official.txt in this distribution contains copyright and license as well as other information. The files README.scowl-nn.txt contain source and settings information for the various dictionaries.

• yawl.txt.gz, yawl-sig.txt.gz, yawl-all.txt.gz: Yet Another Word List
  From Aaron Bull Schaefer's GitHub archive of Mendel Leo Cooper's word list built with the assistance of Alan Beale. yawl-sig.txt is a small list of optional words that might be added to yawl.txt: yawl-all.txt.gz is the sorted concatenation of these lists. The files README.yawl-official.md and README.yawl-original.md in this distribution contain copyright and license as well as other information.

To use these lists, gunzip them. The result will have UNIX line-endings (ASCII LF) which may need help on non-UNIX boxes. The shell script mkdict.sh may be useful in installing these on your machine.

The Scrabble™ SOWPODS list is not made available here due to copyright concerns.