The YAWL Word List

Every count on this site comes from one file: the public domain YAWL word list with 264,179 entries. This page documents where the list comes from, how it is locked, and exactly how many entries it holds for every length and every first letter. If the numbers here and the numbers on any other page ever disagree, that is a bug, not a rounding choice.

This list powers the word finder on the home page and every word list on the site.

Provenance

License
public domain
Source
https://github.com/elasticdog/yawl
SHA-256 checksum
61e4bce0c132e7616dfca5efcee809807ceccab32b87b97b87bd16a80ccc205d
Pinned on
2026-08-06
Total entries
264,179

Word Count by Length

Letters Word count
2 123
3 1,255
4 5,249
5 12,036
6 21,434
7 32,054
8 39,288
9 38,319
10 33,691
11 26,659
12 19,518
13 13,381
14 8,768
15 5,443
16 3,250
17 1,799
18 968
19 509
20 245
21 99
22 41
23 22
24 15
25 3
27 2
28 2
29 2
30 1
31 1
32 1
45 1
All lengths 264,179

Word Count by First Letter

Each letter below links to its full list in the words that start with section.

First letter Word count
A 15,495
B 13,632
C 23,808
D 15,897
E 10,879
F 9,835
G 8,599
H 9,857
I 9,939
J 2,093
K 2,836
L 7,354
M 14,644
N 6,395
O 8,551
P 23,338
Q 1,342
R 14,289
S 29,969
T 13,835
U 9,437
V 4,331
W 5,470
X 304
Y 937
Z 1,113
All letters 264,179

Every search result and every count on this site comes from one text file: the YAWL word list, 264,179 words, all lowercase, one per line. This page is that file's biography, so you can judge for yourself whether to trust the numbers.

What YAWL is

YAWL stands for Yet Another Word List. It was assembled by M. Leo Cooper and his colleague Alan Beale specifically for word games, and its authors released it into the public domain outright, taking care that it would stay copyright free for good. It is a superset of the older public domain ENABLE list by the same authors, so every word this site used before is still here, with tens of thousands more added. It contains no proper nouns, no hyphenated forms, and no abbreviations, but it does list inflections as separate entries, so a verb and all its forms each count. Entries run from the 123 two letter words up to a single forty five letter tongue twister, PNEUMONOULTRAMICROSCOPICSILICOVOLCANOCONIOSIS. The thickest band sits at eight letters, with 39,288 entries.

Why not TWL or SOWPODS

The tournament lists are better known, and slightly more current, but they are proprietary. We could not legally publish either list in full, which would leave you unable to verify anything we claim. At 264,179 words YAWL is comparable in scope to the international Collins list, yet it is fully open, so we can ship the entire thing and be checked against it. We would rather be exactly right about an open list than approximately right about a closed one.

What the checksum means

On this page you will find a SHA-256 fingerprint of the dictionary file. Think of it as a wax seal. Anyone with the same file can recompute the fingerprint and confirm it matches, and any tampering or accidental edit breaks the seal instantly. Our build system checks the seal before it builds a single page.

How the counts are derived

No number near a word count on this site was typed by a person. At build time, every figure is computed from the dictionary file and wrapped in a machine readable marker. Then an independent verification step recounts everything from the raw file and compares. Any mismatch stops the release. So when a page tells you there are 1,342 words that start with Q, that number was counted, twice, by two separate programs that must agree.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why does this site include such rare and unusual words?
YAWL is a maximal word-game list, built to cover the words that turn up across crossword and word-construction games, so it carries archaic, dialect, and international entries that a casual player will not recognize. Everything here is a real dictionary word, but if your game uses a smaller North American tournament list, a few of the rarer entries may not count there. That is a difference between dictionaries, not a bug.
Why not use the official Scrabble dictionary or Collins?
Licensing. The North American tournament list belongs to NASPA and Hasbro, and the international Collins list belongs to HarperCollins. Neither can be republished wholesale by a site like this one. YAWL was explicitly placed in the public domain by its authors, which means we can ship the entire list, count it, and let you check our math.
What does the checksum on this page mean?
It is a SHA-256 fingerprint of the exact dictionary file this site was built from. Change a single letter anywhere in the file and the fingerprint changes completely. Our build recomputes it every time and refuses to run on a mismatch, so the tables on this dictionary page always describe the precise file behind every search result.
Will the dictionary ever change?
Only as a deliberate, visible update: a new file, a new checksum, and a full rebuild in which every count on every page moves together. What never happens is silent drift, where a list changes underneath the numbers that describe it.