Dictionary version: 27
This document lists the sources used to produce the dictionary and any lists associated with them. This file must be kept with any of these lists and provided if these documents are posted elsewhere.
Role in this project: Primary word list (195,383 words), front/back hooks, and probability-factor scores.
Source: Word Game Players Organization (WGPO)
WOW24v3.zip, hosted by Tyler Hosting / Hoot - Downloads page: https://www.tylerhosting.com/hoot/downloads.html#databases - Direct URL: https://www.tylerhosting.com/hoot/downloads/WOW24v3.zipLicense (verbatim from the WOW24v3.txt file header):
WOW24 may be used and shared freely as long as it's not for profit.
Attribution: WGPO (Word Game Players Organization), https://wordgameplayers.org
Role in this project: Primary source of definitions, part-of-speech blocks, inflection tables, and polyorth (alternate-spelling) groups.
Author: Joe Petree
Description: An extended version of the Free Zyzzyva dictionary created and distributed within the competitive Scrabble community. Definitions are formatted with inflections and part-of-speech labels, and include polyorth groups for variant spellings. The help file describes it as "The extended Free Zyzzyva dictionary" with "numerous changes and additions" beyond the standard dictionary.
Filename: Petree-OWL2.1.txt
Known definition sources within this file:
© are taken from the Project Gutenberg Etext of Webster's Unabridged 1913 Dictionary, which is in the public domain.+ were generated programmatically.Definition source markers in the unified output:
© — from Webster's Unabridged 1913 (Petree convention, public domain)+ — programmatically generated (Petree convention)† (U+2020 DAGGER) — definition derived from Wiktionary source text and summarised/reformatted by Claude Sonnet (claude-sonnet-4-5); released under CC BY-SA 4.0License: Custom personal permission granted by Joe Petree (March 2026). Verbatim conditions:
"I hereby grant you permission to publish or disseminate any of the information I have sent, with the following conditions:
- that it not be SEVERELY altered.
- that my name, Joseph Petree, shall be added to the AA record of the
definitions file. Secondly, please give my advance notice of your publication, not that that is real important."
Role in this project: Supplementary definitions for the ~7,157 WOW24 words that lack a Petree entry or have a blank Petree definition. Definitions are fetched via the Wiktionary REST API.
Source: English Wiktionary, maintained by Wikimedia Foundation contributors
https://en.wiktionary.org/api/rest_v1/page/definition/{word}License: CC BY-SA 4.0 — Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (and GFDL as dual-license option).
Attribution (required by CC BY-SA 4.0):
Definitions sourced from Wiktionary contributors, https://en.wiktionary.org, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/.
Processing: Raw Wiktionary definitions were summarized and reformatted into terse Petree-style entries by Claude Sonnet (Anthropic, claude-sonnet-4-5). The AI-generated output was derived solely from the Wiktionary source text and general linguistic knowledge, and is released under the same CC BY-SA 4.0 license as the source.
ShareAlike obligation: Because Wiktionary content is CC BY-SA 4.0, any output file that incorporates Wiktionary definitions must itself be distributed under CC BY-SA 4.0 or a compatible license.
Role in this project: Optional faster alternative to live Wiktionary API calls, via the --wiktionary-dump flag (if implemented). The kaikki.fi JSONL file is a pre-parsed extraction of English Wiktionary.
Source: kaikki.org, maintained by Tatu Ylonen
Data license: CC BY-SA (same as Wiktionary — the extraction inherits the source license).
Tool license: The wiktextract extraction tool is MIT licensed.
Attribution:
Dictionary data from kaikki.org (Tatu Ylonen), extracted from Wiktionary, licensed under CC BY-SA https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/.
Academic citation (if applicable):
Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317–1325, Marseille, 20–25 June 2022. http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2022/pdf/2022.lrec-1.140.pdf
Role in this project: Some definitions in the Petree file are marked with © indicating they originate from this source (distinct from copyright — the © symbol is Petree's marker for "from Project Gutenberg Webster's").
Source: Project Gutenberg Etext of Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
License: Public domain in the United States (published before 1928). No attribution required, but this provenance is noted for completeness.
Role in this project: This project has a word list file specifically formatted for import into Zyzzyva. The format, conventions (tab-separated WORD\tDEFINITION, < ROOT, prefix, /-separated definition sections), and special symbols used in this dictionary follow Zyzzyva conventions as a custom dictionary.
Application: NASPA Zyzzyva, Version 3.4.1 Publisher: North American Word Game Players Association (NASPA Games) Copyright: © 2005–2023 North American Word Game Players Association, D/B/A NASPA Games. All rights reserved. Home page: https://www.scrabbleplayers.org/zyzzyva/ Contact: zyzzyva@scrabbleplayers.org
Note: Zyzzyva is not a data source for this pipeline. It is credited here because the output format is tailored to it and users will need it to view the dictionary.
Role in this project: Source list of polyorthographic (alternate-spelling) word groups, used as one of the inputs to the polyorth consolidation pipeline (pipeline_inputs/OSPD-Polyorths.txt).
Source: Amit Chakrabarti
License: No explicit license stated on the page. Used here for non-commercial Scrabble study purposes. Attribution provided as a courtesy.
I thank Rebecca Slivka and the Seattle Scrabble Club for their idea of having topical Scrabble lists, and for the ideas for many of the lists included on the Portland Scrabble Club website.
Role in this project: The NASPA Anamonics site is used as the original source of many of the anamonics in this project. These pages show the top-ranked 6–7 letter stems, each expanded with one-letter extensions, back hooks, and WOW24 definitions.
Source: NASPA (North American Scrabble Players Association)
History: In the early 1990s, Nick Ballard organized the first drive to coin anamonics for high-probability stems, publishing collections in his journal Medleys and elsewhere. John Chew collected and published anamonics online for a decade starting in the late 1990s; his collection was transferred to NASPA in 2025.
Contributors (author name, number of anamonics): These are the contributors listed on the NASPA Anamonics site. Note that many of the anamonics in this project have been changed from the original.
| Author | Anamonics |
|---|---|
| Kenji Matsumoto | 284 |
| Robert Gage | 142 |
| Mic Barron | 130 |
| Dean Cullen | 53 |
| Scott Pianowski | 42 |
| Doug Riblet | 31 |
| John Chew | 28 |
| Andrew Gaertner | 27 |
| Wolf Hass | 20 |
| Noah Kanter | 17 |
| Daniel Stock | 14 |
| Ron McGill | 13 |
| John O'Laughlin | 12 |
| Michael L. Wilson | 11 |
| John Terrell | 10 |
| Shannon Burns | 9 |
| Jeff Myers | 9 |
| Jim Kramer | 8 |
| Steven Alexander | 6 |
| Dan Stock | 6 |
| John Babina III | 5 |
| Jonn Dalton | 5 |
| Michel Demers | 5 |
| Bill Huttel | 4 |
| Gary Russell | 4 |
| Evan Berofsky | 3 |
| Darin True | 3 |
| Dylan Early | 3 |
| Jeff Kesner | 3 |
| Aaron Long | 2 |
| Aaron Mandel | 1 |
| Allen Fountain | 2 |
| Brian Galebach | 1 |
| Chazz Brown | 1 |
| David Boys | 1 |
| David Pearl | 1 |
| David Stone | 2 |
| Edward Gowash | 1 |
| Frank Kashuk | 1 |
| Geoff Thevenot | 1 |
| Greg Edwards | 1 |
| James Cherry | 1 |
| Jeremy Jeffers | 1 |
| Jerry Hedden | 1 |
| Joel Horn | 1 |
| John Luebkemann | 1 |
| John Van Pelt | 1 |
| Lester Schonbrun | 1 |
| Linda Bredel | 1 |
| Lynda Finn | 1 |
| Max Panitch | 1 |
| Michael Wilson | 2 |
| Nathan James | 1 |
| Noreen Kenny | 1 |
| Paul Collins | 2 |
| Phil Kretschman | 2 |
| Randall Thomas | 2 |
| Ray Wong | 1 |
| Rich Baker | 1 |
| Rick Wong | 1 |
| S. Spencer Sun | 1 |
| Steve Dennis | 2 |
| Tony Clifton | 1 |
| Tony Leah | 1 |
| William Snoddy | 2 |
License: No explicit license stated. The anamonics collection is published by NASPA for community use. Used here for non-commercial Scrabble study purposes. Attribution provided to all contributors as listed above.
| Source | License | ShareAlike? | Commercial use? |
|---|---|---|---|
| WOW24 | "Free for non-profit" | No | No |
| Petree OWL2.1 | Custom personal permission | N/A | No |
| Wiktionary | CC BY-SA 4.0 | Yes | Yes |
| kaikki.fi data | CC BY-SA 4.0 | Yes | Yes |
| Webster's 1913 | Public domain | No | Yes |
| OSPD Polyorths | No license stated | — | Non-commercial |
| Anamonics | No license stated | — | Non-commercial |
| This output | CC BY-SA 4.0 | Yes | No (WOW24 terms) |
Released under: CC BY-SA 4.0 Creative Commons Attribution – ShareAlike 4.0 International
License text: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
Additional non-commercial restriction (WOW24): This work incorporates WOW24 content, which may only be used and shared for non-profit purposes per WGPO terms ("WOW24 may be used and shared freely as long as it's not for profit"). This restriction applies independently of the CC BY-SA 4.0 license. Users must comply with both: the CC BY-SA 4.0 terms and the WOW24 non-profit restriction. Petree's personal permission grant is likewise limited to non-commercial use.
Scrabble™ is a trademark of Hasbro, Inc. in the US and Canada. No affiliation with Hasbro is intended or implied and this does not constitute an endorsement of any kind.