In early September a reader left a comment with eleven words in it and nothing else. No greeting, no complaint, just a list: RILLE, NIFLE, INCLE, GERLE, EDILE and six more. Every one of them was a word our Wordle solver had failed to find for them.
We looked up all eleven. Nine went into the dictionary, one was already there, and one did not pass. Then more lists arrived: six words, and a few days later four more from the same reader. Single words came in between. By September 19 the count stood at 24 suggestions, 20 new words, and three polite refusals.
None of this is new. It is how the dictionary behind this site has been maintained for a long time. We have just never written it down, so here it is: what was added, what was not, how we decide, and how to get your own word in.
The words we added
Nineteen of the twenty are below. The last one is a slang word that is fine to play but that we would rather not define on a page children might read. It is in the solver all the same.
| Word | What it means |
|---|---|
| UNSAY | To take back something you said |
| RILLE | A long, narrow valley on the surface of the Moon |
| CHYLE | The milky fluid the small intestine produces during digestion |
| PHYLE | A tribe or clan in ancient Greece |
| EDILE | A Roman magistrate in charge of public buildings and games, also spelled aedile |
| INCLE | A kind of linen tape, also spelled inkle |
| GERLE | Edmund Spenser's spelling of girl |
| MEDLE | An old spelling of meddle, found in Shakespeare |
| DWILE | An East Anglian word for a floor cloth, and the thing you throw in the pub game of dwile flonking |
| NEELE | An old word for a needle |
| REWAX | To wax something again: a floor, a car, a pair of skis |
| TOWNY | Typical of a town, or another spelling of townie |
| ZHUZH | To smarten something up, as in "zhuzh it up a bit" |
| GURGE | A whirlpool. Heralds still use it for a spiral on a coat of arms |
| KURRE | An old kind of trawl net |
| UMBRE | An old spelling of umber |
| PURRE | A British dialect name for the dunlin, a small wading bird |
| PORGE | To make meat kosher by removing the forbidden veins and sinews |
| POWRE | An old spelling of pour |
Fifteen of the nineteen end in E, which tells you how this reader plays: fix the ending, then work through everything that fits. If that is your method too, the full list of 5-letter words ending in E now has all of them, and so do the pages for 5-letter words starting with P and starting with G.
A word added to the five-letter list does not stay there. The Spelling Bee solver, the Blossom solver and the anagram solver are built from the same dictionary, so ZHUZH and PORGE turned up in all three the same day.
The ones we turned down
NIFLE means a trifle, and people stopped using it in the 1600s. That alone would not rule it out, since several words in the table above are just as old. The difference is that those still appear in the word lists tournament Scrabble players use, and NIFLE does not appear in any list or modern dictionary we could find. If no word game accepts it, putting it in a solver only produces a suggestion you cannot play.
ZZYZX is a settlement in the Mojave Desert, pronounced roughly "zy-zix". It is a wonderful thing to type, but it only exists as a place name, and we do not take proper nouns. If we did, every town and surname would have the same claim, and the results would fill up with words no game accepts.
PERNE was the closest call. W. B. Yeats used it in "Sailing to Byzantium" for the spinning of a bobbin, and as far as anyone can tell he made it up for that poem. One poet using a word once is not quite enough. If a major dictionary ever adopts it, we will too.
And SNAFU was already in the dictionary, so that one only needed a reply.
How we check a word
There is no committee. A suggestion comes in, and one of us sits down with it. The questions are always the same.
Is it in a recognised dictionary, or in one of the official Scrabble word lists? Either will do. The Scrabble lists matter because many Wordle-style games built their list of accepted guesses from them, so a word that is valid there has a good chance of being valid in the game you are playing.
Is it an ordinary word rather than a name? Places, people and brands stay out. We have made exceptions for things that are names but behave like vocabulary: dinosaur genera, for instance, after readers asked for them this summer.
Is it actually five letters (or six, or seven) of plain A to Z? Hyphens, apostrophes and accents rule a word out, because no game board can take them.
If the answers are yes, the word goes in, usually within a few days and often the same day. If the answer is no, we say so and explain why. We would rather turn a word down openly than ignore the comment.
One honest limit: being in our dictionary does not guarantee that your particular game will accept a word. Our list is deliberately wider than any single game's list, because people use the solver for the daily Wordle, for unlimited clones, for six and seven-letter variants and for crosswords. The five-letter list alone now holds just under 40,000 words.
Why rare words do not clutter your results
The obvious worry about adding words like KURRE is that they will crowd out the words you actually want. They do not, because the solver does not treat all words equally.
Every word carries a rank based on how common it is in real English. Results are sorted by that rank, so ABOUT and HOUSE come first and KURRE comes last. New additions go in where they belong: ZHUZH and REWAX low, the four-hundred-year-old spellings at the very bottom. You will only meet them when you have ruled out nearly everything else, which is exactly when you need them.
The same ranking is why the solver's first suggestions tend to be plausible answers rather than curiosities. If you want to know what makes a first guess good in the first place, our article on Wordle strategy goes through the numbers, and there is a separate one for the best 6-letter starting words.
This has been going on for a while
September was busy, but it was not unusual. Scroll through the changelog and most entries begin the same way: a reader told us something was missing.
In May a reader noticed that the 11-letter solver could not find YANDUSAURUS, a Jurassic plant-eater, and by July that had grown into a whole batch of dinosaur names. EMOJI went in during June. RETIE, UNBAR, UNPIN and GUTTY followed in July, along with GIBES, which a player reported missing in the middle of a game. In August someone suggested VERISIMILITUDINOUS, which is now the pride of the 18-letter word list, and DIZZIER joined the 7-letter solver the same week.
We did not find a single one of these ourselves. A dictionary of this size has gaps that only show up when a real person, playing a real game, types in a real word and gets nothing back. That person is the only one who knows, and if they say nothing the gap stays.
How to suggest a word
Leave a comment. That is the whole process.
You can do it right here, in the discussion under this article. Or, on any solver page, open the menu and choose Comments.
It helps if you tell us:
- the word, spelled the way you played it
- which game accepted it, if you know
- anything else you noticed while you were there
That last one matters as much as the words. In July a reader spotted that the past Wordle answers page could give away tomorrow's answer early, so we closed the gap. Another traced a run of bad suggestions back to a misspelling, EMJOI, that had been sitting in the list next to EMOJI. Our Hard Mode advice was rewritten in January because players told us it did not match the official rules. None of that came from us.
So it does not have to be a word. If the 6-letter solver gave you something strange, or a page looks wrong on your phone, say so. Bug reports, complaints and half-formed ideas are all welcome. We read everything, and we answer.
Frequently asked questions
How do I report a word that is missing from the Wordle solver?
Leave a comment under this article, or open the menu on any solver page and choose Comments. Give us the word and, if you can, the game that accepted it. We check every suggestion, and valid words are usually added within a few days.
Why was my word not added?
The usual reasons are that it is a proper noun, such as a place or a surname, or that it does not appear in any recognised dictionary or official Scrabble word list. If we turn a word down, we reply and say why.
Will every word in your dictionary be accepted by Wordle?
No. Our dictionary is wider than the word list of any single game, because the solver is used for many different Wordle-style games and for crosswords. Common words are accepted almost everywhere. Very rare ones depend on the game.
Do rare words make the solver's suggestions worse?
No. Results are ordered by how common each word is, so everyday words come first and rare words sit at the end of the list. A newly added rare word only shows up once you have narrowed the board down a long way.
How many words are in the dictionary?
The five-letter list holds just under 40,000 words, and there are separate lists for every length from 3 to 18 letters. The six, seven and eight-letter lists are each larger than the five-letter one.
Join the discussion
Spotted an error, or have a result of your own? We read every comment.