Dictionaries, languages and word-list credits

Word Release supports British English, American English, German, Spanish and French. Each player uses their own dictionary on a shared board. The game checks every complete word formed by your move against your dictionary.

Choose your dictionary

On the game selection screen, open Language, select a dictionary and confirm. This choice applies to new games. An existing game keeps the dictionaries selected when it began. The flag beside each player’s name identifies their dictionary. Use the book button during a game to search your game’s word list.

Choose which human opponents to allow

Under the dictionary choices is Allow online games with players using different dictionaries? This Yes/No setting is saved to your account and used for new online games.

• No: match only within your language. British and American English count as English, so these two dictionaries can still pair. German, French and Spanish each pair with their own language.
• Yes: permit other languages too, provided both players allow cross-language matching. Matching still prefers your exact dictionary, followed by the other English dictionary where applicable; other language pairings become eligible after the 24-hour search period.

Each player’s words, including side words, are checked in their own dictionary. Words are not automatically translated. Changing this default does not change the matching choice of games already started.

What language do bots use?

Online fallback bots: if a bot joins after the 24-hour search period, it uses your exact dictionary, regardless of the slider. A British English player therefore receives a British English bot, not an American English bot or a randomly selected language.

Easy, Medium and Expert bot games: you explicitly choose the bot’s dictionary when starting the game. The online matching slider does not limit this choice. You can use British English yourself and choose French for the bot, for example. Bot difficulty changes its play, not which dictionary you selected.

Practice: you play alone using your selected dictionary.

Accents and shared tiles

All five dictionaries use the shared A–Z tiles. German uses AE for Ä, OE for Ö, UE for Ü and SS for ß. Spanish removes vowel accents and diaeresis and uses N for Ñ. French removes accents and expands Œ to OE and Æ to AE. Imported lists are uppercased, filtered to the supported word format and deduplicated. Check the game dictionary for the spelling accepted in play.

Dictionary sources, permissions and credits

The lists are used under their published open licences or public-domain terms. These licences provide the permission to use and adapt the relevant material; no endorsement of Word Release by the authors is implied. These are adapted playable word lists, not official tournament dictionaries. Their original notices and terms remain available below.

British English

The frequency-ranked core is adapted from Geoffrey Leech, Paul Rayson and Andrew Wilson (2001), Word Frequencies in Written and Spoken English, based on the British National Corpus, whole-corpus frequency lists. The source and derived British core word data are available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 UK: England & Wales. Word Release aggregated recorded forms and frequencies, filtered spellings and selected 10,000 core entries. Download the derived core list. Broader additions use ENABLE, described below. Detailed attribution and changes.

American English

The frequency-ranked core uses SUBTLEX-US word frequencies redistributed by words/subtlex-word-frequencies, based on American movie subtitles. Redistribution is under the ISC licence, copyright © 2015 Zeke Sikelianos. Word Release aggregated spellings, filtered the supported forms and selected 10,000 core entries. Download the derived core list. Broader additions use ENABLE. Full ISC copyright, permission and warranty notice, with source details.

Shared English additions

Both English lists include words from ENABLE (Enhanced North American Benchmark LExicon), Alan Beale and M. Cooper, released into the public domain. See the ENABLE public-domain declaration and credits and source word-list mirror. Word Release filtered A–Z entries of 2–15 letters through the corresponding LibreOffice British or American Hunspell spelling lookup. Those spelling dictionaries were used during preparation and are not bundled as spelling dictionaries in the game. Game-maintained additions include short words. Current English word data; build counts and source hashes.

German

Adapted from German wordlist for Tanglet and other wordgames, Markus Enzenberger and contributors, under CC0 1.0 Universal. Changes: uppercase, German character expansions for A–Z tiles, filtering to 2–15 letters and deduplication. Full CC0 dedication; adapted word data.

Spanish

Adapted from words/an-array-of-spanish-words, copyright © 2016 Zeke Sikelianos, under the MIT licence. Changes: uppercase, accent and diaeresis removal, Ñ to N, filtering to 2–15 A–Z letters and deduplication. Full MIT copyright, permission and warranty notice; adapted word data.

French

Adapted from Lexique 4.10, Boris New, Christophe Pallier, Gauvain Schalchli, Jessica Bourgin, Manuel Gimenes and contributors, under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International. Word Release extracted orthographic forms with recognised grammatical categories, uppercased them, removed accents, expanded OE/AE ligatures, excluded punctuation, spaces and unsupported lengths, then deduplicated and sorted the list. The adapted French word data remains available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Attribution, changes and licence links; adapted word data.

All dictionary source notices. These notices describe the word data; each component retains its applicable terms. Return to Rules or play Word Release.