Every LexiLayers game runs on the same shared dictionary of English words — around 125,000 of them, from three to ten letters long. Here's how we put it together, and why some words are in and others aren't.
Our base word list started from the same public tournament-style English word lists that power most serious word games. These lists are maintained and refined over decades by lexicographers and competitive players, so they strike a good balance between everyday vocabulary and the slightly more obscure words that make word games fun to master.
A raw tournament word list is not the same thing as a word list that belongs in a friendly, inclusive game. We want LexiLayers to be a place that people of any background can enjoy without running into ugly surprises, so every entry has been reviewed with that in mind.
Words are removed from the dictionary if they are:
At the same time, we've tried hard not to over-prune. Mild everyday words, clinical anatomical terms, words that describe violence in a neutral sense (kill, murder, fight), and ordinary words that just happen to sound edgy in certain dialects all still play. We want the dictionary to feel like real English, not a sanitized subset of it.
A big part of how we decided what to remove comes from the work of NASPA, the North American Scrabble Players Association. NASPA governs competitive Scrabble across the US and Canada and, together with Hasbro, maintains the official tournament word list used in sanctioned play.
In July 2020, NASPA took the significant step of removing hundreds of slurs from their tournament word list. It was the result of a long internal debate — serious Scrabble players had argued for years that a dictionary should describe language, not endorse it — and the decision was ultimately made to make the game more welcoming to everyone who wanted to play it.
We respect that decision deeply, and we've made sure every word NASPA identified as unwelcome in tournament play is also unwelcome here. It gave us an authoritative starting point that has been vetted by people who love English words more than almost anyone, and it saved us a lot of guesswork.
Dictionaries are living things. If you feel a word is missing that should be playable, or — just as importantly — if you spot something in the list that you think shouldn't be there, please let us know. Use the feedback form in the main menu, or report it through the in-game bug reporter. Every report is read by a human, and we update the word list on a regular basis.
Language is complicated, and we won't always get every judgment call right. But we'll keep listening, and we'll keep refining — because a word game is only as good as the words it lets you play.