The ENABLE Word List

Every count on this site comes from one file: the public domain ENABLE word list with 172,823 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://raw.githubusercontent.com/dolph/dictionary/master/enable1.txt
SHA-256 checksum
3f16130220645692ed49c7134e24a18504c2ca55b3c012f7290e3e77c63b1a89
Pinned on
2026-07-19
Total entries
172,823

Word Count by Length

Letters Word count
2 96
3 972
4 3,903
5 8,636
6 15,232
7 23,109
8 28,420
9 24,873
10 20,302
11 15,504
12 11,358
13 7,827
14 5,127
15 3,192
16 1,943
17 1,127
18 594
19 329
20 160
21 62
22 30
23 13
24 9
25 2
27 2
28 1
All lengths 172,823

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 10,456
B 9,279
C 16,229
D 10,149
E 7,067
F 6,767
G 5,589
H 6,303
I 6,978
J 1,376
K 1,716
L 5,055
M 9,628
N 4,392
O 5,843
P 14,566
Q 822
R 10,159
S 18,988
T 8,747
U 5,070
V 2,735
W 3,694
X 136
Y 547
Z 532
All letters 172,823

Every search result and every count on this site comes from one text file: the ENABLE word list, 172,823 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 ENABLE is

ENABLE stands for Enhanced North American Benchmark Lexicon. It was assembled in the nineties by Alan Beale and Mendel Cooper specifically for word games, and its authors released it into the public domain outright. 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 96 two letter words up to a single twenty eight letter monster, ETHYLENEDIAMINETETRAACETATES. The thickest band sits at eight letters, with 28,420 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. ENABLE trades a few modern additions, most famously QI and ZA, for something we value more: the right to ship the entire list 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 822 words that start with Q, that number was counted, twice, by two separate programs that must agree.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why are QI and ZA not accepted here?
Both are missing from ENABLE, which was compiled before tournament dictionaries added them. We show exactly what our pinned list contains, so neither word will appear in any tool or count on this site until the list itself is deliberately updated. If your game accepts them, 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 SOWPODS list belongs to Collins. Neither can be republished wholesale by a site like this one. ENABLE 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.