What this is

The English word list shipped with Alfa Kraft — every move you play in an English match is checked against it. It is a flat, alphabetically sorted text file where each line is one accepted form.

It is built from two sources, because they fail in opposite directions. YAWL was finished in 2008 and has not moved since; it was built for word games, so it carries the short, odd-looking forms a player will actually try — qi, za, oi, te. SCOWL is a spell-checker project that is still maintained; it carries the words English gained after 2000 — email, internet, blog, podcast, selfie, emoji. Neither list makes a good game dictionary on its own. Together they do.

SCOWL keeps six spelling sets — English, American, British, Canadian and two variant sets — and all six are read, so British, American and Canadian spellings all play: colour and color, realise and realize, theatre and theater. Inflected forms come with both sources directly, so plurals, verb forms and other regular variants are accepted without a runtime expansion step.

What gets filtered out

A word ships only if it can actually be played on an Alfa Kraft board. Dropped:

• Proper names — London, Sweden, Monday, January. SCOWL files names, abbreviations, contractions and capitalised forms separately from ordinary words, and only the ordinary-word files are read. Words that double as names stay: google, einstein.
• Contractions — isn’t, they’re. An apostrophe has no tile, and stripping it leaves something that is not a word.
• The rarest levels — SCOWL grades every word by how common it is. Everything down to level 70 is in; the two levels below that are misspelling collections and name dumps, and stay out.
• Anything outside the alphabet — 2–15 letters from [a-z] only. No spaces, digits, hyphens, apostrophes or accented letters.
• Curated junk — two- and three-letter abbreviations (kb, ms, csc), truncations and stray place names inherited from the sources’ spell-checker ancestry. A junk short entry is the most damaging kind, because short words are what players probe hardest.

What gets added

A handful of words neither source happens to carry and a player would reasonably expect: ew, ok and ze, plus missing forms of words already in the list — mountie beside mounties, sheqels beside sheqel. With the removals above, that is the whole editorial layer — everything else is exactly what the two sources carry.

English entries do not include part-of-speech or inflection metadata, so the search page renders results as a simple word list.

Sources & credit

• YAWL (Yet Another Word List, 0.3.2.03) — compiled by Mendel Cooper, released to the public domain — the word-game baseline.
• SCOWL (Spell Checker Oriented Word Lists, 2020.12.07) — by Kevin Atkinson and contributors, from wordlist.aspell.net — the modern vocabulary.

Mendel “Mel” Cooper put YAWL in the public domain with no restrictions at all, asking only that he be credited as a courtesy. Cooper passed away in 2018; his lists live on as the community resource he intended.

SCOWL is Kevin Atkinson’s long-running collection of spell-checker word lists, assembled from a chain of public-domain and permissively licensed sources and maintained to this day. Its license allows use, copying, modification, distribution and sale, provided its copyright notice travels with every copy — which is why the notice is reproduced below.

License

YAWL is in the public domain: no restrictions on its use or distribution, commercial use included.

SCOWL’s license requires its copyright notice to appear in all copies and in supporting documentation. The word list on this site is derived from SCOWL, so the notice is reproduced here verbatim:

The collective work is Copyright 2000-2018 by Kevin Atkinson as well
as any of the copyrights mentioned below:

  Copyright 2000-2018 by Kevin Atkinson

  Permission to use, copy, modify, distribute and sell these word
  lists, the associated scripts, the output created from the scripts,
  and its documentation for any purpose is hereby granted without fee,
  provided that the above copyright notice appears in all copies and
  that both that copyright notice and this permission notice appear in
  supporting documentation. Kevin Atkinson makes no representations
  about the suitability of this array for any purpose. It is provided
  "as is" without express or implied warranty.

SCOWL is itself assembled from many upstream lists, each carrying its own notice. The complete Copyright file from the SCOWL 2020.12.07 release is reproduced verbatim at scowl-copyright.txt.

Alfa Kraft’s English word list is our own compilation from the two public sources above. It is not an official tournament word list, and Alfa Kraft is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or licensed by any word-game publisher or tournament body.