The Gridogram wordlist includes common and uncommon English words, with both American and British English spellings.
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 190,520 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 includes a word with an apostrophe, that has to be an accepted word. So if “it’s” is in the quote, tracing the grid letters will reveal both “its” and “it’s” in the word list. This only counts as finding one word, so you can still get 100% accuracy even if “its” is not in the quote (blue border).
Finally, international phenomenon Rick Astley can’t be quoted without using “gonna”. 😏
