Vowl · About
The dictionary
Vowl accepts and answers with every word in ENABLE, the open Scrabble word list. Here is what that is, why it is the one, and what it means for the game.
What ENABLE is
ENABLE stands for Enhanced North American Benchmark Lexicon. It was assembled in the 1990s by Alan Beale as a public domain word list for word game software, and it is the list behind a lot of things you have played. It is not owned by anyone, it costs nothing, and it does not come with a licence that says you cannot ship it.
Vowl uses the words of each length as both the guess list and the answer list. No separate curated set of answers, no distinction between words you may guess and words that may come up. If Vowl accepts it, Vowl can pick it.
| Length | Words | Ending in S | All distinct letters |
|---|---|---|---|
| 4 | 3,903 | 814 | 3,106 |
| 5 | 8,636 | 2,695 | 5,665 |
| 6 | 15,232 | 4,277 | 7,260 |
Why not the Wordle list
Wordle has two lists: about 2,300 curated answers and roughly 13,000 accepted guesses. The answer list was hand picked to be words a normal person knows, which is the right call for a daily puzzle everybody does at once and then talks about.
It is the wrong call here for two reasons. The first is that Vowl is a race, and 2,300 answers is small enough that a regular player starts recognising the pool, which quietly turns the game into a memory contest. The second is that the curated list is somebody's property and a copy of it in this repo would be a problem.
The cost is real and worth stating plainly: you will occasionally lose to a word you have never seen. That is the trade. In exchange the pool is big enough that nobody can memorise it and everyone hits obscure words at the same rate.
Why not the official Scrabble lists
TWL and SOWPODS are the tournament lists, and they are both maintained by publishers who licence them. ENABLE overlaps with them heavily and is free, which settles it.
What it means for strategy
Mostly it means plurals. 2,695 five letter answers end in S, 31 percent of the list, where Wordle deliberately has almost none. That one fact rewrites the opening book, which is what this page is about.
It also means the list runs long on words like ACYLS and ABRIS. If a guess gets rejected and you were sure it was a word, it is usually a proper noun, a hyphenated form, or something that entered English after the mid nineties. ENABLE does not get updated.
Word lengths
Four letter games are the flattest: fewer words, less structure, openers matter least. Six letter games have the most structure, because the last two slots are highly predictable, and counterintuitively they are the easiest to open well. Five is the middle and the default.