Official Scrabble Dictionary: TWL vs SOWPODS Explained

Two official lists, one game

Tournament Scrabble uses two different word lists depending on where you play:

• TWL (Tournament Word List) — used in North America and Thailand. About 192,000 words.
• SOWPODS / CSW (Collins Scrabble Words) — used everywhere else in the world. About

280,000 words.

CSW is a strict superset: every TWL word is in CSW, but CSW adds thousands more — mostly

British, Indian, and Caribbean English vocabulary, plus archaic spellings.

Words in CSW but not TWL

These are legal internationally but illegal in North American tournaments:

• DA, ZO, EW — extra 2-letter words
• THANG, EUOI, CWMS, CRWTH — common in UK play, unfamiliar to US players
• Hundreds of -ISE / -ISED / -ISES spellings (BRITISH spellings of -IZE verbs)

Which should you use?

Casual play: use whichever dictionary your group agrees on. Most home games default to

TWL in the US/Canada and CSW elsewhere.

Online play: Scrabble GO uses TWL by default in the US. Words With Friends uses its own

"Enhanced North American" list that's close to TWL but adds slang.

Our tools: UnscrambleIt ships with the ENABLE word list (around 170,000 words) — a

public-domain dictionary used by many word games. Use the Dictionary selector in Advanced

Options to switch to TWL or CSW when checking tournament legality.

Why two lists exist

Historical accident. In the 1970s, Hasbro (then Selchow & Righter) commissioned a North

American list. Mattel, which owns Scrabble outside North America, contracted Collins to build

the international list. Neither side wants to merge — partly tradition, partly so each market

can ban or accept words on its own terms.

TL;DR