Rules Explained

Three Games, Three Dictionaries: Why Your Word Might Be Valid in One and Rejected in Another

September 23, 2026 · 6 min read

Play Scrabble, Words with Friends, and Wordfeud regularly, and you'll eventually hit the same frustrating moment in all three: a word gets accepted in one game and flatly rejected in another, despite the games looking almost identical on the surface. That's not a bug in any of them. Each one is checking your word against a genuinely different dictionary, and the gaps between those dictionaries are bigger than most players realize.

~192,000words in NWL, the US and Canada Scrabble list

~280,000words in Collins (SOWPODS), the international Scrabble list

That's roughly a 90,000-word gap between the two main Scrabble dictionaries alone, before Words with Friends or Wordfeud even enter the picture. NWL, officially the NASPA Word List, governs tournament Scrabble in the US, Canada, and a handful of other countries. Collins, still widely called SOWPODS from its original name, governs everywhere else, the UK, Australia, and most of the WESPA-affiliated world. The extra 90,000 words are mostly British spellings and Commonwealth vocabulary that never made it into the American lists NWL was built from.

Words with Friends doesn't use either one. It runs on ENABLE, a separate word list Zynga has modified with its own rules layered on top, making it a genuinely third dictionary rather than a copy of either Scrabble list. That's why a word can validate on our Scrabble Word Finder and still get rejected inside the actual Words with Friends app, or the reverse.

The irony writes itself: the word "wordfinder" is itself a perfectly legal Words with Friends play, worth 19 points on our own Words with Friends Word Finder:

Try it in standard Scrabble, either dictionary, and it's rejected outright. ENABLE's more permissive, socially-aware word list accepts plenty of everyday terms that never made it into either Scrabble list, BROMANCE and FOMO among them, while still rejecting some things you'd expect it to allow, like the plural VAPES even though VAPE itself is valid.

Wordfeud does something neither Scrabble nor Words with Friends offers: it lets you choose. Every Wordfeud player picks NWL or Collins as their dictionary setting, meaning two people in the same match can be playing under two different word lists at once.

Here's a concrete example rather than an abstract one. Two-letter words are the backbone of tight-board Scrabble play, since they're what let you attach a new word to an existing one without opening up the board. Collins added a batch of two-letter words that NWL still doesn't recognize:

CHDIEAEEFYGUIOJAKOKYNYOBOOOUSTUGURYUZEZO

Every one of those is a real, playable word if you're on Collins. Try any of them on an NWL-based board and it won't count. Notably, even with this addition, there's still no two-letter word in English Scrabble containing the letter V, a genuine gap in both dictionaries.

None of this makes one dictionary more "correct" than another. They're just different standards, shaped by which side of the Atlantic built them and which company maintains them. The practical takeaway is simpler: know which dictionary your specific game and opponent are actually using before you argue about a rejected word, since the word might be completely valid, just not in that particular list.

These lists also aren't frozen in time. The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary's most recent edition added around 500 new words in 2022, including YEEHAW, ZOOMER, BAE, and DUMPSTER, a word that had previously been blocked for being considered a trademark. An earlier edition added GEOCACHE after an actual public vote to choose it. Words move in and out of eligibility as culture shifts and dictionary maintainers reconsider what counts as established vocabulary, which means a word rejected today might genuinely be valid in a future update, and vice versa.

For what it's worth, our own tools default to the broadest reasonable assumption rather than picking a side: the Scrabble Word Finder and Scrabble Score Calculator use a general dictionary as a close approximation of NWL, the Words with Friends Word Finder notes plainly where ENABLE's own quirks might cause a mismatch, and the Wordfeud Helper doesn't assume either of Wordfeud's two dictionary options for you. None of them will match a specific app's word list with total precision, which is exactly why understanding these three dictionaries actually differ matters more than trusting any single tool blindly, ours included.