Scrabble Dictionaries Explained: TWL, SOWPODS, and Collins
Why the same word can be valid in London and invalid in Los Angeles, and where Words With Friends fits into all of it.
Ask two Scrabble players from different countries whether a word is valid and you can get two honest, correct, contradictory answers. That’s not a bug in the game, it’s the result of a decades-old split most players have heard of but few could actually explain. This guide walks through why the split happened, what’s genuinely different between the lists, and why a site claiming one single “Scrabble word count” is usually oversimplifying.
BackgroundWhy the Split Exists
Scrabble’s history explains the divide better than any rulebook does. After Alfred Mosher Butts developed the game in the 1930s, the rights ended up split by region: Hasbro controlled North America, while rights elsewhere eventually settled with Mattel. Because the two companies ran their word-list development separately for decades, North America and the rest of the English-speaking world simply never standardized on the same dictionary. Two independent lists grew up in parallel, each shaped by different source dictionaries and different regional vocabulary.
That history is also why the international list has such an unusual name.
North AmericaTWL / NWL: The North American List
The list used across the United States, Canada, Thailand, and Israel started life as the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary (OSPD) and has gone through several official names since, most recently the NASPA Word List (NWL), maintained by the North American Scrabble Players Association. Recent editions sit around 190,000 to 192,000 words. The most recent major update, NWL2023, added over 4,500 words compared to its predecessor, including a batch of 11 to 15-letter words pulled from the Canadian Oxford Dictionary.
This is the list your 5 Letter Word Finder‘s “Scrabble-style US” dictionary is built to approximate.
InternationalCollins / SOWPODS: The International List
Everywhere else, roughly speaking, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and the rest of the WESPA-affiliated world, tournament play runs on a different list entirely, now officially called Collins Scrabble Words (CSW), still widely nicknamed SOWPODS.
SOWPODS isn’t a word, it’s an anagram. In 1991, two separately developed lists merged into one international standard: OSW (Official Scrabble Words, the British list) and OSPD (the American list). Combine the letters of those two abbreviations and rearrange them, and you get SOWPODS. The merged list has been rebranded and updated many times since under Collins’ publishing, but the old nickname stuck.
Collins is considerably larger than the North American list, sitting close to 279,000 to 280,000 words, roughly 90,000 more entries than TWL/NWL. That gap is mostly British-English spellings, Commonwealth vocabulary, and international terms that never made it into the American dictionaries the North American list was built from.
DataThe Numbers Compared
Word count differences aren’t evenly spread across all lengths. Here’s the actual Collins Scrabble Words breakdown by word length, a real illustration of how fast the count grows as length increases, something we cover from a strategy angle in our Scrabble Strategy Guide by Word Length.
| Word length | Collins (CSW) word count |
|---|---|
| 2 letters | 127 |
| 3 letters | 1,351 |
| 4 letters | 5,662 |
| 5 letters | 13,018 |
| 6 letters | 23,140 |
| 7 letters | 34,506 |
| 8 letters | 42,341 |
Since TWL/NWL is built largely from the same American source material Collins later absorbed, the great majority of shorter, common TWL words are also valid in Collins, the practical gap shows up mostly in longer, more obscure, and regionally-specific entries rather than in everyday short words.
Recent historyWord Lists Get Edited, Not Just Expanded
It’s easy to assume a dictionary only ever grows. Both lists have actually had words removed, not just added, and the most recent example is worth knowing about specifically. In the transition to CSW22, 419 words were deleted from Collins Scrabble Words following a directive from Mattel, part of an ongoing commitment to review and remove hate speech from the game. Three further words were removed in the move to the current CSW24 edition. NASPA’s list has gone through its own version of this too, NWL2020 removed certain offensive slurs from the North American list around the same period.
This matters practically: if you’re ever unsure why a word your older printed dictionary lists no longer plays online, an edition-driven removal is a genuinely common explanation, not a bug in whatever tool you’re using.
Words With FriendsWhere Words With Friends Actually Fits In
Here’s a detail that surprises a lot of players who assume Words With Friends just runs a version of Scrabble’s dictionary: it doesn’t. WWF’s word list is built on ENABLE (Enhanced North American Benchmark Lexicon), a separate, public-domain word list originally developed for general word-game use, not derived from either TWL or Collins. ENABLE sits at roughly 172,000 to 173,000 words, smaller than both Scrabble lists, but Zynga’s actual in-game list applies its own modifications on top: no standalone abbreviations, no proper nouns, no words requiring hyphens or apostrophes.
The practical result is a word list with real personality differences from Scrabble’s: it leans slightly more permissive around casual, modern vocabulary in places, while still excluding categories Scrabble’s dictionaries handle differently. If you’ve ever had a word accepted in one game and rejected in the other, this is usually why, not a bug, a genuinely different source dictionary.
Check a word against the right list
Switch between six independently sourced dictionaries, not one list with six labels.
Which One Actually Applies to You
- Playing a club or tournament in the US, Canada, Thailand, or Israel: TWL/NWL governs your game.
- Playing anywhere else internationally, including the UK, Australia, and WESPA-sanctioned events: Collins/SOWPODS governs your game.
- Playing Words With Friends casually with friends: neither Scrabble list applies directly, you’re working from ENABLE with Zynga’s own modifications layered on top.
- Playing casual, non-tournament Scrabble with family: whichever list your board’s country edition ships with, though most casual games don’t strictly enforce this at all.
None of this is officially licensed information from Hasbro, Mattel, Collins, or Zynga, it’s a summary of how these lists are publicly documented and discussed by the competitive Scrabble community, the same honest framing behind every word list on this site, as explained on our About page.
There isn’t a single “correct” Scrabble dictionary, there are two, built independently, for historical reasons that have nothing to do with which words are more legitimate. Knowing which one governs the game you’re actually playing matters more than memorizing either list in full.
Frequently Asked Questions
Broadly, yes, the majority of common TWL words are also valid in Collins, since Collins absorbed the American source list during the 1991 merger. But it’s not a perfect subset in every edition, and the roughly 90,000-word gap is concentrated in longer and more regional entries rather than common short words.
Most commonly, you’re checking against the wrong list for the platform you’re playing on, or a word was removed in a recent edition, as happened with the 419 words dropped from Collins in the CSW22 update.
No. Words With Friends is built on ENABLE, a separate public-domain word list, with Zynga’s own additional rules layered on top. It’s neither TWL/NWL nor Collins.
Collins sits around 279,000 to 280,000 words, compared to roughly 190,000 to 192,000 in the current NASPA Word List, a gap of about 90,000 words.