Puzzle Cottage / Open Data
Open data

Free word-game datasets — ENABLE word list downloads

Public-domain word lists for developers, researchers, and word-game projects. The ENABLE dictionary (~80,000 English words, 1–8 letters) is the de-facto standard for North American word games — same list used by serious Scrabble software, Words With Friends, and Wordle’s allowed-guess pool. Free to use, redistribute, modify. Attribution appreciated but not required.

ENABLE word list (full)
JSON · ~3.5 MB · 80,376 words · 1–8 letters
The complete ENABLE dictionary subset used by Puzzle Cottage word games — 1 to 8 letter English words, all uppercase, alphabetized. Words flagged as predominantly proper nouns (HARRY, PETER, etc.) are excluded. Format is nested JSON with a words key containing arrays keyed by length.
Download JSON View raw
Wordle 5-letter word list (plain text)
TXT · ~50 KB · 8,636 words
All 5-letter ENABLE words — the Wordle allowed-guess pool. One word per line, plain text, easy to grep/process. Note: this is the guess pool, not Wordle’s curated 2,315-word answer list (which is owned by NYT and not included here).
Download TXT View raw
Wordle 5-letter words (JSON)
JSON · ~150 KB · 8,636 words
Same 5-letter list as the .txt version above, structured as JSON with metadata for programmatic use.
Download JSON View raw

License

The ENABLE word list itself is in the public domain — compiled by Mendel Cooper from various public-domain sources in the late 1990s. There is no copyright restriction on the underlying words. This packaging (Puzzle Cottage’s curated subset and JSON formatting) is also released to the public domain.

You can use these datasets for any purpose — commercial, academic, educational, fun. Attribution to Puzzle Cottage isn’t required but is appreciated when convenient.

Quick start examples

JavaScript

// Load and use the full ENABLE list
fetch('https://puzzlecottage.com/data/enable-word-list.json')
  .then(r => r.json())
  .then(data => {
    console.log(`Got ${data.counts['5']} five-letter words`);
    const isWord = w => data.words[w.length]?.includes(w.toUpperCase());
    console.log(isWord('CRANE'));   // true
    console.log(isWord('XQRZP'));   // false
  });

Python

import urllib.request, json

with urllib.request.urlopen('https://puzzlecottage.com/data/enable-word-list.json') as r:
    data = json.load(r)

print(f"Total: {sum(data['counts'].values())} words")
print(f"5-letter: {data['counts']['5']}")

valid = lambda w: w.upper() in data['words'][str(len(w))]
print(valid('CRANE'))  # True

Bash / curl

# 5-letter Wordle list as plain text
curl -O https://puzzlecottage.com/data/wordle-valid-words.txt
wc -l wordle-valid-words.txt    # 8636

# Filter for words containing Z
grep Z wordle-valid-words.txt | head -20

About ENABLE

The Enhanced North American Benchmark LExicon (ENABLE) was compiled by Mendel Cooper in the late 1990s by combining several public-domain word lists, including the Spell Checker Oriented Word Lists (SCOWL). It contains approximately 173,000 English words and was adopted as the de-facto standard for free Scrabble clones, online word games, and academic word-game research.

The Tournament Word List (TWL) used in official North American Scrabble is similar but maintained separately and includes some words ENABLE omits. ENABLE is what you want when you need a permissive, public-domain English word list.

Other word-list resources on Puzzle Cottage

Roadmap

More open-data assets planned:

If you have a specific dataset request — especially for academic/research use — get in touch.