About Spell Zoo

Spell Zoo is a word unscrambler with the complete word lists published behind it. Type your letters into the solver and it tells you every word they spell. Browse the lists and you get every word of a given length, or every five letter word starting with a given letter, with nothing trimmed off the bottom to make the page load faster.

The dictionary

One word list feeds everything here: the ENABLE word list, a public domain compilation that most free word game tools are built on. It contains no proper nouns, no acronyms and no abbreviations. That sounds like a small detail and it is not. General purpose spellchecker dictionaries are full of entries like BD, AFB and ACCT, and a site that folds those into its counts will tell you there are four hundred two letter words when the real figure is under a hundred. Every count on this site comes from counting the same list the solver searches.

Words in everyday use are marked as common, and every list page has a filter that hides everything else. Common has an exact meaning here rather than a vague one: a word is marked common if it falls inside the 50,000 most frequently used words in a large corpus of contemporary English. That is why LARGEST and ANGELS are marked and SALTERN and XEBEC are not. It is the honest way to handle a word game list: the obscure entries are legal and they belong in the list, but they are not what you are looking for when you are checking a spelling or picking a Wordle guess.

What is here

• The unscrambler: letters in, every word they make out, grouped by length.
• A page for every word length from 2 to 15 letters, each one the complete list.
• A page for every starting letter at five letters, the length people look up most.

Why the counts can be trusted

Every number printed on a page is generated from the database at the moment the page is built, never typed in by hand, and the build refuses to publish a page that would list zero words. The example words quoted in the writing are checked against the dictionary automatically before anything goes live, because a page claiming to be the authority on five letter words cannot afford to quote one that is not in its own list.

If you find a word missing, a count that looks wrong or an example that does not hold up, the contact page reaches a person, not a queue.