Word Operative's unscrambler and dictionary tools are built on several open and public domain language datasets. We're grateful to the original creators, organizations, and volunteer communities who compiled and maintain these resources, and we credit each of them below.
License status: Permissive open source (MIT/BSD style)
Copyright 2000–2019 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.
License status: Permissive open source, via AGID
The 2of12inf database is a subset of the 12Dicts package originally researched and compiled by Alan Beale. It utilizes linguistic data from the Automatically Generated Inflection Database (AGID) to accurately map plural extensions and verb tense conjugations. Alan Beale released the 12Dicts lists into the public domain; 2of12inf’s dependency on AGID means it carries AGID’s terms instead, which are reproduced below.
License status: Permissive open source, via AGID
The Jumble Solver orders its candidate answers by how common the words in them are, using the
2+2+3frq list from Alan Beale’s 12Dicts package. That list groups words into bands
of similar frequency using data from Brigham Young University’s Corpus of Contemporary American
English (COCA). Like 2of12inf above, it depends on AGID and carries AGID’s terms.
License status: Permissive, attribution required
Copyright © 2000–2014 by Kevin Atkinson. Permission to use, copy, modify, distribute and sell this database, 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.
License status: Fully public domain
The ENABLE (Enhanced North American Benchmark Lexicon) word list was originally compiled by Alan Beale and M. Cooper. It has been placed fully into the public domain by its authors to serve as an unencrypted, free, and unrestricted open reference engine for developers and games globally.
License status: Freeware, a hybrid of two permissively licensed British English sources
This list combines two related resources. The UK Advanced Cryptics Dictionary (UKACD), copyright © J Ross Beresford 1993–2000, draws on the Chambers, Collins, and Oxford dictionaries and permits free redistribution provided the copyright notice and this licensing text are reproduced, with the author stating there are "no other restrictions" and that he would like to see the list distributed as widely as possible.
The English Open Word List (EOWL), compiled by Ken Loge, is a cleaned and supplemented derivative of the UKACD: entries longer than 10 letters, hyphens, diacritical marks, and proper nouns were removed, and additional words were drawn from the Scrabble Players Dictionary, Third Edition. Both sources are freely distributable, and together they form the basis of our British English list.
License status: Permissive open source (MIT and Unlicense)
The Spelling Bee Solver's “Known answers” tier — words the NYT has actually accepted, rather than merely words that fit the puzzle's grammar — is built from two independent, non-overlapping public archives of past Spelling Bee puzzles and their answers: tedmiston/spelling-bee-answers and philshem/scrape_bee. Together they cover 1,173 puzzle days between 2019 and 2025. Neither archive is still being updated, so more recent puzzles — and any word the NYT has only ever used since — are not yet reflected; see the Spelling Bee Solver page for what that means in practice.
spelling-bee-answers: MIT License. Copyright (c) 2023 Taylor D. Edmiston. Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions: the above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
scrape_bee: Unlicense. This is free and unencumbered software released into the public domain. Anyone is free to copy, modify, publish, use, compile, sell, or distribute this software, either in source code form or as a compiled binary, for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial, and by any means.
License status: Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0)
The definitions and semantic linguistic mappings used on this platform are processed via the parsed structured dumps provided by Kaikki.org (the Wiktextract project). This data is pulled directly from the crowdsourced database at Wiktionary and is used under the provisions of the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (CC BY-SA).
Open data access: rather than distributing our own copy of the underlying dataset, we point you straight to the source. The full structured Wiktionary extract is published freely by Kaikki.org and can be downloaded directly from their site by anyone who would like their own copy for research, development, or any other purpose.
