# Dictionary sources

## Broad dictionary

Source: https://github.com/dwyl/english-words
Revision: 20f5cc9b3f0ccc8ce45d814c532b7c2031bba31c
File: words_alpha.txt
Retrieved: 13 September 2026
Licence: Unlicense, permitting commercial use, modification and redistribution. Full upstream notice retained in vendor/english-words/LICENSE.md.

The unmodified upstream file is retained in vendor/english-words/words_alpha.txt. We filter to lowercase ASCII alphabetic words of 4–10 letters, deduplicate and sort. Five-letter entries become words.js; other lengths become general-words.js. This is a general dictionary, not a publisher-approved game list. Rare words may appear.

## Familiar five-letter words and historical coverage

Source: https://github.com/johnfoland/nyt-wordle-played — played_5.json, snapshot downloaded 11 September 2026 and retained in tests/fixtures/nyt-wordle-historical-answers.json.
Licence: CC0 1.0, https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ (full licence in tests/fixtures/CC0-LICENSE.txt).

The recorded past words form the familiar five-letter tier. Words absent from the broad dictionary are generated into historical-wordle-words.js. There is no live answer lookup. Historical use does not guarantee acceptance by another game. Other word lengths use the broad dictionary without labelling every entry common.

Rebuild with python3 scripts/build-dictionary.py. The previous undocumented lists are not used as inputs. This records the upstream published licensing; it is not a guarantee about every upstream contributor's rights.

Upstream dictionary SHA-256: `3ed0c94610d8bcf7c11bbb49c56aa49c7234d32b66824df91f554169e572da48`.