I’ve been doing a bit of work with a move generator for Zynga’s popular variant on Scrabble, Words With Friends (WWF). To be any good at that, you need a list of words what WWF considers valid. Fortunately, they mention on their website that they use a slightly modified version of ENABLE, which is freely available.

Unfortunately, I noticed that sometimes WWF would complain about words I generated not being valid. After ensuring that the generated words were indeed in the ENABLE dictionary, it became obvious that Zynga’s dictionary removes some words from ENABLE. From experience, these generally included words that some people might consider offensive. For example, the word ABO, which is a pejorative for an Aboriginal Australian, is not recognized by WWF. In addition to this, ENABLE includes words that are longer than 15 letters. Since WWF’s board is 15×15, it’s impossible to form a word longer than 15 letters. Strangely enough, WWF still recognizes these words, despite them not being valid plays.

In an attempt to get a dictionary that’s as close to possible as the one WWF is actually using, I used an open source library I’ve been developing to ping them with all of the words shorter than 16 letters in the ENABLE dictionary. They removed about 50 words from the standard ENABLE dictionary.

A quick poll of a few “cheat” websites indicated that they were using the vanilla ENABLE dictionary, which includes the removed words.

You can find the updated dictionary here: wwf-dictionary.