Assorted thoughts and notes on Gridogram
The Gridogram wordlist includes common and uncommon English words, with both American and British English spellings.
Certain players like to find words beyond what’s in the quote. Someone once found a staggering 458 words in a grid! When there are fewer available words, occasionally all have been found. The record so far: one player found all 281 available words in Gridogram 2025-05-17.
Part of the fun can be discovering new words: which did you miss in the grid? So the wordlist requires some curation. Seeing you missed a word nobody’s uttered in the last century isn’t very interesting.
What is a valid word in Gridogram world?
The original English words came from the open-source Wordnik Wordlist. As new Gridograms are created, any missing words are added to the list (e.g. “gilets”), and words with no valid definitions on Wiktionary are removed (e.g. “compt”). As of writing there are 192,808 valid words.
What do you mean by “valid definition”?
Each word has an entry on Wiktionary. A word is excluded if all its English definitions are labelled as one of:
Those are the general principles established so far, aiming to create a modern international English wordlist. There will naturally be exceptions, like if a quote uses a contraction, that contraction has to be an accepted word. After all, international phenomenon Rick Astley can’t be quoted without “gonna”.
