details

crossword-specific datasets: answers that have appeared since 2020 in the USA Today, Universal, and Modern crosswords are scored the highest. higher scores are also given to answers that have appeared in other publications since 2020 with varying policies for long (7+ letters) and short (6- letters) answers.

other datasets: to ensure our wordlist is not solely composed of past crossword answers, freely available datasets sourced from Wikipedia, news search terms, Jeopardy terms, and Scrabble words have been incorporated. various resources have been used to prioritize US English spellings.

blocklist: we have manually developed a list of offensive content; this is supplemented with similar externally developed lists. the last step of our wordlist creation algorithm is to scan it for any answer that is in our blocklist; those answers are set to zero if they appeared in a crossword-specific dataset and are removed otherwise. see also our faq.