Check Dictionary

Settling It In One Step

The question comes up in the middle of a game and it needs answering now, not after three tabs and a cookie banner. Type the word, get an answer, and if it is valid you also get what it is worth in Scrabble and in Wordfeud plus a link to the definition.

The two scores are there because the games do not agree. A word can be worth 12 in Scrabble and 18 in Wordfeud, and if you play both, knowing which is which is genuinely useful.

Why Games Disagree About Words

There is no single English word list, and understanding that ends most arguments before they start.

North American Scrabble uses one official list. The rest of the world uses a larger one that adds tens of thousands of entries, many of them British and Commonwealth spellings and dialect words. A word can be perfectly legal in London and refused in Chicago. Neither player is cheating.

Mobile games then pick their own. Words With Friends, Wordfeud and the rest each licensed or assembled a list, and those lists were updated at different times and to different standards. Newer slang and internet vocabulary appear in some and not others.

This page checks against a widely used open word list of roughly 270,000 entries. It is a good general answer and it is close to what most games accept, but if your game says no, the game wins. It is enforcing its own list, and no amount of being right elsewhere changes that.

What Will Not Be Found Here, Even Though It Is Real

A word coming back as not found does not always mean it is not a word. Four categories are missing by design.

Proper nouns. Names of people, places, companies, brands and characters are not in the list. Word games exclude them too, so this usually matches what your game does.

Abbreviations and acronyms. Anything that stands for something else is out, unless it has become a word in its own right.

Hyphenated and multi-word forms. The list holds single unbroken words. A compound that is normally written with a hyphen or a space will not be found, which is also how word games treat it.

Very recent vocabulary. Standard word lists are revised slowly. Words that entered common use in the last few years are frequently missing from all of them, which is why a word everybody you know uses can still be refused.

When a word is not found, the result links to Merriam-Webster so you can check whether the word exists in a full dictionary even though it is absent from the game list. Those are two different questions and it is worth keeping them apart.

Reading The Scores

The number shown is the face value of the word with no board involved: add up the tiles and that is it. No letter multipliers, no word multipliers, no bonus for using all your tiles. It tells you what a word is intrinsically worth, which is the right way to compare two candidates before you think about where they will sit.

The gap between the two games comes from a handful of letters. Wordfeud gives J 10 points where Scrabble gives it 8. B, C, F and P are 4 in Wordfeud and 3 in Scrabble. G is 3 against 2. U is 2 against 1. Everything else matches or is close. So a word heavy in those letters scores noticeably better in Wordfeud, and a word built from one point tiles scores the same in both.

Neither score includes the bonus for laying all seven tiles, which is 50 in Scrabble and 40 in Wordfeud. That bonus is usually the largest single thing available to you in a game, and it is worth far more than picking the higher scoring of two short words.

When You Are Checking A Lot Of Words

Checking one word at a time is right for settling a dispute. It is the wrong tool for other jobs, and this site has better ones.

If you want to know every word your letters can make rather than whether one particular word is valid, use the Word Unscrambler. If you want the highest scoring plays from a rack, use the Scrabble Word Finder, the Words With Friends Cheat or the Wordfeud Helper, each of which scores with that game's own table.

If you have a list of scrambled words to solve, the Word Descrambler takes the whole list at once.

The Words Worth Memorising

If you play regularly, a small amount of memorisation removes most of the need to check anything.

The two letter words. This is the highest return list in any word game. Knowing them lets you play parallel to an existing word and score every tile twice, and it turns dead racks into playable ones. The full list is on this page.

The three letter words. Longer list, still short enough to learn, and they are what let you slot a play into a tight board. They are on this page.

The Q words that need no U. A handful of words, and they convert the single most awkward tile in the bag into a playable one. Here they are.

Learn those three sets and the number of times you need to check a word drops sharply, because most disputes are about short words rather than long ones.

Want every word instead of one?

Enter your letters in the Word Unscrambler and get every valid word, grouped by length.