SOURCES & LICENCES
About our dictionary.
Our three helpers search word lists in your browser. Here is where those words come from and how we prepare them.
The general dictionary
We use the dwyl English Words dictionary, published under the Unlicense. It permits use, modification and redistribution, including commercial use. Read the full Unlicense notice.
Our copy uses revision 20f5cc9, downloaded on 13 September 2026.
Familiar five-letter words
Our familiar five-letter group comes from the nyt-wordle-played historical dataset, published under CC0 1.0. We use a snapshot downloaded on 11 September 2026. Words from that snapshot also supplement the general dictionary where needed. Read the full CC0 licence.
This is a fixed list of previously played words. The helper does not look up a daily answer, and past use does not make a word more likely to be today’s answer.
How we prepare the words
We keep lowercase words containing only the letters A–Z, from four to ten letters long for the word finder, and two to fifteen letters for the word unscrambler. We remove duplicates and separate five-letter words from other lengths. The original source and a rebuild script are retained with the project.
The familiar group applies to five-letter word-finder suggestions. Other word-finder lengths use the general dictionary, which includes rare words. Word-finder suggestions are filtered by your clues and ranked using letter coverage. The unscrambler and Spelling Bee helper use the general word list.
How each helper matches words
Word finder: checks word length, known positions, required and excluded letters, wrong positions and optional letter counts. It searches words from four to ten letters.
Word unscrambler: treats the input as a rack of 2–15 tiles. Each tile can be used once; ? or * supplies one letter, up to two blanks. The default uses every tile. Include shorter words allows a subset. Prefix, suffix and other filters do not add tiles.
Spelling Bee helper: accepts seven distinct letters and a required centre letter. Matches must contain the centre letter and use only the seven letters; repeats are allowed. Results range from the selected minimum (four to eight) up to fifteen letters. Pangrams use all seven letters at least once.
What a match does not tell you
Our general dictionary is not an official Wordle, Spelling Bee, NWL or Collins game lexicon. It does not reproduce an official daily word list, and result counts may differ from your puzzle. The tools do not fetch daily answers. Examples explain the matching rules; they are not claims about a particular day’s puzzle.
We test matching rules and example flows with automated tests. If a word or explanation looks wrong, report the helper, letters and issue so it can be checked against the source and rules.
Each game has its own dictionary
A word appearing here does not guarantee that your game will accept it. Wattle Puzzle Helpers is independent and is not affiliated with The New York Times or the dictionary contributors.