Written by Pop, Editor of Solving Wordscapes. Study, published September2026. Every number in this article comes straight from the game’s own level data, checked by hand.
Wordscapes hands you the letters N, Y, A, Y, T, D, S. The grid wants DYNASTY. This is the level 415. Along the way it happily accepts SAY, DAY, NAY, STAY but when you swipe “YAY”, the word known by everybody, the tiles bounce back. YAY is not a word here. Nowhere in the game. Other boards happily take HEYDAY and MAYDAY. Just never YAY.
That moment, the swipe that should have counted, but it’s does not !, that moment is a quietly lonely one: just you, the board, and Wordscapes that pretends it does not exist. That momoent happens to every single player.
That’s why I decided to measure it.
I took the letter set of all 6,000 main levels, calculated every valid English word each one can form under one of the game’s main “word validity” rules : Number of letters requested in the level.
Then checked which of those words the game actually knows. This article is the result: how big the gap really is, which words fall into it, which levels are the worst offenders, plus a few genuine surprises I did not expect to find.
The headline numbers
Across the 6,000 main levels, the letters on your screen can form 15,612 distinct valid English words that a player is actually allowed to swipe. Wordscapes only knows 10,959 of them. The other 4,653 words are silently rejected: they never appear as a grid answer or a bonus word anywhere in the game.
On an average level, that is about 9 perfectly legitimate words the game will refuse if you try them. And on the “worst” level, which we will get to, it is 53.
How I ran the test :
Four input went into this study.
First, the puzzle data: the letter racks, grid answers, plus bonus word lists of all 6,000 main levels, from the version v 3.13.30 of the game, alongside the 366 daily puzzles whose details are documented in the daily puzzles study published on this site the previous month.
Second, a reference dictionary : I used ENABLE, the public domain word list with 172,823 entries that sits behind many online scrabble games, of which 51,852 have the 3 to 7 letter length, the range of words Wordscapes actually accepts. I selected ENABLE because anyone can download it and double check my numbers.
Third, the word engine : For each level, I generated every ENABLE word that its letters can form, each tile usable once. It is the same logic that runs in the Wordscapes solver of this site, so you can see the full word space of any level yourself in one click.
Fourth, the minimum number of letters accepted: Each Wordscapes level allows only specific word lengths, and I respect them strictly. The game’s own data gives 3,317 levels built around a 3 letters minimum and 2,683 built around a 4 letters minimum. It goes further than a simple minimum: 187 levels skip a length in the middle, including boards that take 3 and 6 letter words but nothing in between. One board offers DOG and EGO on its way to DOGGIE, and no 4 letter word exists on it at all, normal, it’s the design of the game. So, a word of a length a level was never built for is not rejected there, it is out of bounds, so I never consider it as “not accepted”. Every word in my rejected total was refused on at least one level where its length was fully legal.
One more point : I only count a word as rejected if it never appears in a single answer or bonus list across more than 30,000 puzzle records, that’s because many levels have two versions of the game data, plus the 366 dailies.
=> So, every Word here survived these filters.
What kind of words get cut :
The rejection rate is not spread evenly. It depends heavily on word length:
| Word length | Playable valid words | Accepted | Rejected | Acceptance rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 3 letters | 965 | 642 | 323 | 67% |
| 4 letters | 3,694 | 2,358 | 1,336 | 64% |
| 5 letters | 5,398 | 3,239 | 2,159 | 60% |
| 6 letters | 3,959 | 3,217 | 742 | 81% |
| 7 letters | 1,596 | 1,503 | 93 | 94% |
5 letter words are the trap: 4 out of every 10 valid 5 letter words you can form are unknown to the game. Meanwhile 7 letter words are ok at 94%, which makes sense because the 7 letter words are usually the marquee grid answers.
Most of the 4,653 casualties are, frankly, dictionary deep cuts. Words like AMIA, AMAIN, ANSAE, ENOL or CETE are valid in ENABLE, yet almost nobody outside competitive Scrabble would miss them.
The story does not end here !
The 45 everyday words you would swear should count
I ranked all 4,653 rejected words by real-world frequency using the wordfreq corpus, which measures how often words actually appear in modern English text. It gave me 153 rejected words that are genuinely common in everyday English.
I’ve set aside the names, the places and the brands for a moment, so It left 45 ordinary words that real people type every day, none of which Wordscapes knows.
Here are the ones I refused to believe :
| Word | Why it hurts |
|---|---|
| YAY | Refused on a board that hands you two Ys next to DYNASTY |
| GIMME | Refused on a board where 5 letter words are fully legal, so no excuses Mr PeopleFun |
| THO | The casual spelling of though, it’s dico valid ! |
| WONT | As in “as is his wont”, a real noun |
| CANT | Without the apostrophe it is a real word for insincere talk |
| SEC | As in “give me a sec”, playable in 91 levels. it’s dico valid |
| HATH | Old form of HAS and still valid word.. |
| SANS | Fully English word |
| OLE | Playable in 139 levels, never accepted |
| DEE | Just D ! |
| TYRE | English but not American English |
That DEE entry deserves its own paragraph, because the letter names have no logic at all. Wordscapes accepts TEE, GEE, VEE, ZEE and KAY. It rejects DEE, CEE, ESS, WYE and EFF, all of them playable in many levels, DEE can be played in 234 puzzle but it’s not accepted in any of them. Same category of word, same dictionaries, all accepted except DEE !
This is proof that the game runs on a manually verified list rather than a standard dictionary, only half of the alphabet names are accepted.
This is the evidence of the human fingerprint.
There is also a small club I started calling the apostrophe casualties: HES, SHES and WHATS are all in ENABLE as legitimate words, and all three are rejected, presumably because they look like typos of contractions. Understandable. Still …
Wordscapes does not know your name
Of the remaining153 common words rejected by Wordscapes, a full 106 are proper noun lookalikes: first names, cities, brands.
Most of them are legitimate dictionary words, a john is a bathroom, a tom is a male cat, jean is a fabric, but the game does not accept them. ANNA, JANE, TOM, MARIA, ROGER, TROY, ROMEO: all valid in ENABLE, all playable somewhere in the 6,000 levels, but are rejected.
So if you try your own name, it will be refused. (unless your name/nickname is like me : Pop the game knows it, it’s valid and playable in the grid on 21 boards).
Seriously, the game filters that entire family out, and honestly, for a casual audience, that is probably the right call. It is one of the few rejection patterns in this study that looks fully deliberate.
Two levels that show the gap
Level 108 is a compact showcase. The rack is E, R, U, S, P, a small 5 letter board whose star answer is SUPER, and the game accepts 18 words there, 11 in the grid plus 7 as bonuses. My engine finds 9 more valid words it refuses, including SUPE, on the SUPER board of all places, along with SUER, PURS and SPUE.
A full third of everything you can legitimately spell on the board at wordscapes level 108 simply does not count, on one of the smallest racks in the game.
Level 1403 is the record holder. Its letters, N, S, A, E, M, A, I, produce the grid answers AMNESIA and ANEMIA, and they also produce 53 valid words the game rejects, the highest count of any level in the game. The rack is have too many vowels, few of them are : AMAIN, MINAE, SEMINA, ANSAE. If you have ever felt that the letters on the guide for level 1403, with its full answer set, seemed like they should make more words than the game admits, you were right by a margin of 53.
That AMNESIA board is also one the game’s own data flags as hard, and that is not a coincidence. The hard levels study I did, shows difficulty in Wordscapes clusters around obscure answer words, and this study shows the mirror image: the same letter sets that force obscure answers generate a big list of rejected valid words.
A censorship ?
About the theory of the censorship of missing words : rude words, scrubbed for a family audience. The data says no. Checking the 4,653 rejected words against a standard public list of terms that family products filter out, only about ten match, which is around 0.2%. The family filter exists, but it explains almost nothing.
The flip side: 68 words Wordscapes knows that the dictionary does not
I found 68 words in Wordscapes that do not exist in ENABLE at all, and they tell you exactly when the game’s word list was curated. ENABLE dates from 1997. Wordscapes accepts APP, APPS, BLOG, WIFI, ONLINE, OFFLINE, LOGIN, EBOOK, SPAM, MEMES, NEWBIE, TECH, SOBA, UDON, BLING, ZEN, CAMO and GLAM, among others.
Whoever maintains this word list is probably from this century, lol.
For the complete picture of what the game does accept, the full word list I maintain on the Wordscapes dictionary page is the companion piece to this article that covers what is in, this study covers what is out.
So, is Wordscapes running a Scrabble dictionary?
No.
The famous Scrabble legal weird words mostly die here, on boards where they are fully accepted : ADZ is rejected, CWM is rejected, JEU is rejected. Amusingly, QAT survives, so the game’s list is not allergic to weird words, it’s just selective.
There are only 80 racks containing a Q in the entire game, and the curators clearly decided which Q-words those racks deserved.
The game is also strictly American. As I said, TYRE is rejected on 33 boards where it fits perfectly, while TIRE is accepted. British players, your spellings are welcome also for some words (like FAVOUR and HUMOUR).
The picture that emerges is of a custom dictionary of roughly 11,000 words, so that the long words the rack was designed around almost always count, 94% acceptance at seven letters, while the short tail of technical English is mostly off. The scrabble like list is 52,000 playable words, so wordscapes is using 20% of these words.
Again, this is for sure a design decision.