Methodology & Data Sources
Word validity list
172,823 words, sourced from the ENABLE word list ("Enhanced North American Benchmark LExicon"), a public-domain English word list with no lineage from any proprietary Scrabble®/Words With Friends® dictionary (TWL, NASPA/NWL, or Collins/SOWPODS). Because of this, SnagWord's word validity may differ in places from any official game dictionary — always confirm a word against your game's own rules before relying on it competitively.
Definitions
20,000 curated definitions from two combined public/openly-licensed sources. A Tier-A set of roughly 3,548 entries (all 2-letter words, common 7-letter "bingo" words, high-scoring words, and a broad set of common words) is sourced from Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913), United States public domain — the same historical dictionary family that underlies GCIDE (the GNU Collaborative International Dictionary of English). The remaining common-word coverage — roughly 16,000+ additional entries, bringing the total into SnagWord's 15,000–25,000-word comprehensive common-word target — is sourced from WordNet® 3.1 (Princeton University; "WordNet Copyright 2011 by Princeton University. All rights reserved," used under WordNet's license terms), taking each word's primary (most-frequently-used) sense. Which common words get a WordNet-sourced page first is decided by a word-frequency ranking (Peter Norvig's openly-hosted count_1w list, derived from the Google Books Ngrams corpus) — the frequency data itself is only used to prioritize coverage and is never shown to readers. SnagWord does not publish definitions for every word in its validity list — only where a real, licensed definition exists. A word with no licensed definition simply has no /define/ page rather than a fabricated or thin one. Each definition page states which of the two sources it came from.
Tile values
Tile point values are computed from the standard published point distributions for Scrabble®-brand tiles and Words With Friends®-brand tiles — these are factual, non-creative data points, not proprietary expression. SnagWord labels these "standard word-game tile values," never "official Scrabble® score," and publishes both tables separately since the two games use different point values for several letters.
How solving works
Every solver on SnagWord runs entirely in your browser. Word-list data is fetched lazily in small, per-length chunks only when needed — your letters are never sent to a server to be solved.