Terms of Service

1. Agreeing to these terms

These Terms of Service are an agreement between you and Operative Enterprise, LLC (“we”, “us”, “our”) covering your use of Word Operative at wordoperative.com. By using the site you accept them. If you don't accept them, please don't use the site.

Our Privacy Policy explains how we handle information and forms part of this agreement.

2. What Word Operative is

Word Operative is a free reference and puzzle-solving tool. You give it letters; it searches word lists and tells you what words those letters can make, with definitions, scores and related information. It also offers solvers for specific puzzle formats and short lessons on word patterns.

It is a lookup tool over publicly available word lists. It is not a game, not an official companion to any game, and not a guarantee of anything — see Word lists, trademarks and affiliation.

3. Who may use it

Anyone may use the public parts of the site. To create an account you must be at least 13 years old, or 16 if you are in the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom. If you are under 18, you may only use the site with the involvement of a parent or guardian, and only they may buy the paid upgrade.

4. Accounts

You don't need an account to use the solvers. If you create one:

• Give us an email address you actually control, and keep it current — it is how we reach you about your account and how you recover a lost password.
• Keep your password to yourself. You are responsible for what happens under your account, so tell us promptly through our contact form if you think someone else has got into it.
• One account per person. Don't share it, sell it, or transfer it.
• You can close your account at any time. See the Privacy Policy for what happens to your data when you do.

5. The ad-free upgrade

We offer a paid upgrade that removes advertising from the site for you while it is active. It requires an account, because that is how we know to switch the ads off.

• Price and billing period are shown before you pay. Prices are in US dollars and exclude any tax that applies where you live.
• Payment is handled by an independent payment company, under its own terms. Your card details never reach us.
• If it is a recurring subscription, it renews automatically at the end of each period until you cancel, and we will tell you the renewal date before you first pay.
• You can cancel at any time. Cancelling stops future charges; your ad-free access continues until the end of the period you have already paid for.
• Refunds: if you are unhappy, email us within 14 days of a charge and we will refund it in full, no explanation needed. After that we don't generally give refunds for a period already begun, but ask us anyway — if the site was broken or we got something wrong, we will make it right. Nothing here limits any refund right the law gives you.
• If we change the price, we will tell existing subscribers by email at least 30 days beforehand, and the new price only applies from your next renewal, so you can cancel first.
• The upgrade removes our advertising. It is not a licence to redistribute the site, and it does not change anything else in these terms.

6. Acceptable use

Please don't:

• Scrape or bulk-download the site, or use bots, crawlers or scripts to extract our word lists, results or pages in bulk. Ordinary use is unlimited; automated harvesting is not ordinary use.
• Rebuild or resell the service — use our results as the data source for your own app, site, API or product, or sell access to them.
• Overload or interfere with the site, including denial-of-service attempts, or deliberately sending queries designed to exhaust our servers.
• Break in or poke around — probing for vulnerabilities, bypassing security or access controls, or trying to reach parts of the system that aren't public. If you find a security flaw, please tell us through our contact form rather than exploiting it; we appreciate it and will not pursue anyone who reports one in good faith.
• Circumvent the ad-free upgrade, or block ads in a way that involves modifying or republishing the site itself. (Using an ordinary ad blocker in your own browser is your business, not a breach of these terms.)
• Misrepresent the site as your own, or use it to do anything unlawful.

7. Our content and your rights to use it

The site's design, code, text, lessons and branding belong to Operative Enterprise, LLC or are used with permission. We give you a personal, non-exclusive, revocable licence to use the site for your own word games, puzzles, learning and curiosity — including commercially, if your job happens to involve words. What we don't give you is the right to copy the site, republish its pages, or systematically extract its data, as set out under Acceptable use.

The answers the tool gives you — the words themselves — are facts about the English language, and we claim nothing over them. Use them freely.

8. Word lists, trademarks and affiliation

Word Operative is an independent tool. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by or connected to any game publisher or newspaper. Specifically:

• SCRABBLE® is a registered trademark of Hasbro, Inc. in the United States and Canada, and of Mattel, Inc. elsewhere.
• Words With Friends® is a registered trademark of Zynga, Inc.
• Spelling Bee is a puzzle of The New York Times Company.
• Jumble® is a registered trademark of Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

These names are used here only to describe the puzzles our tools work with, which is what the law calls nominative fair use. All trademarks belong to their respective owners.

Our word lists come from third parties, and each has its own licence and its own idea of what counts as a word — which is why the site lets you search several side by side. See Word Lists and Data Credits. Two consequences worth stating plainly:

• We cannot promise any game will accept a word we show you. Game publishers use their own private dictionaries, which change and which nobody outside those companies has. A word may be valid in one game and rejected in another.
• The lists are not curated by us. They are compiled from publicly available sources and may contain entries some people find offensive. Their presence is unintentional and is not an endorsement — the same note appears on our Word Lists page.

Definitions, synonyms and related information are drawn from third-party reference sources and may be incomplete, dated or wrong. Don't rely on this site where accuracy actually matters.

9. Advertising

The free version of the site is supported by advertising. We don't choose, review or endorse the individual ads shown, and we are not responsible for advertisers' products, claims or websites. If an ad is broken or offensive, please tell us and we will report it.

10. No warranty

The site is provided “as is” and “as available”. To the fullest extent the law allows, we disclaim all warranties, whether express or implied, including implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy and non-infringement.

We don't promise the site will be uninterrupted, error-free, or available at any particular moment, that its results will be complete or correct, or that any game or puzzle will accept its answers. It is a free word game tool; please hold it to that standard and no higher.

Some jurisdictions don't allow the exclusion of certain warranties, so parts of this section may not apply to you.

11. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent the law allows, Operative Enterprise, LLC will not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost data, or lost opportunities, arising from your use of or inability to use the site — including a lost game.

Our total liability for any claim relating to the site is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us in the 12 months before the claim, or US $50.

Nothing in these terms excludes liability that cannot lawfully be excluded, including for fraud, or for death or personal injury caused by negligence. Some jurisdictions don't allow certain limitations, so parts of this section may not apply to you.

12. Indemnification

You agree to indemnify and hold harmless Operative Enterprise, LLC and the people who work on it from claims, damages and reasonable legal costs arising out of your misuse of the site, your breach of these terms, or your violation of anyone else's rights.

13. Suspension and termination

You may stop using the site or delete your account at any time. We may suspend or close an account, or block access, if it is being used in breach of these terms — particularly the Acceptable use rules. Where it is reasonable to do so we will warn you first and give you a chance to put it right; where the conduct is serious or automated, we may act immediately.

If we close a paid account for reasons that aren't your fault, we will refund the unused part of what you paid. Sections that by their nature should survive termination — ownership, disclaimers, liability limits, indemnification and governing law — do survive it.

14. Changes to the service and to these terms

The site will change: features get added, word lists get updated, things occasionally get removed. We may also change these terms. When we do, we will update the “Last updated” date above, and for material changes we will give clear notice on the site beforehand and email account holders. Changes never apply retroactively, and continuing to use the site after they take effect means you accept them. If you don't, stop using the site and, if you have a paid upgrade, cancel it for a pro-rated refund.

15. Governing law and disputes

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Arizona, USA, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. Any dispute will be brought in the state or federal courts located in Arizona, and you and we both consent to their jurisdiction.

If you are a consumer in the EEA or the UK, this does not deprive you of the protection of your own country's mandatory consumer law or of your right to bring proceedings in your local courts.

Before filing anything, please write to us through our contact form. Nearly everything is fixable by a conversation, and we would much rather have one.

16. General

• These terms, plus the Privacy Policy, are the entire agreement between us about the site.
• If any part is found unenforceable, the rest stays in force and that part is narrowed only as far as necessary.
• If we don't enforce something immediately, we haven't given up the right to enforce it later.
• You may not transfer your rights under these terms; we may transfer ours if the business is sold, on the same terms.
• Nothing here creates a partnership, employment or agency relationship between us.
• We are not liable for failures caused by things outside our reasonable control.

17. How to contact us