This page has information about

• The lexicon: Collins Scrabble Words
• Printed books and where to get them
• Apps for word judging and study
• Our set of word lists

Lexicon

In Australia and most of the English speaking world, the official word list is Collins Scrabble Words (CSW).

Collins Scrabble Words is a list of allowable words according to certain criteria.

Criteria

• Does not include proper nouns, place names, and words with an initial capital letter, unless such words can also be spelt with a lowercase initial letter
• Does not include abbreviations, prefixes, suffixes, words requiring apostrophes or hyphens
• Includes foreign words that are considered to have been absorbed into the English language
• Includes inflected forms, such as plurals and verb forms, eg plumb, plumbs, plumbed, plumbing
• Includes words that are old, obsolete, dialectal, historical and/or literary
• Includes World English, including spelling and variants from the US, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, etc
• Includes words that are denoted contractions, short forms and slang
• Includes words which may be deemed rude or offensive.

The sources used are

• Collins English Dictionary 14^th edition
• Legacy words from OSW which used Chambers Dictionary (about 16 000 words)
• North American Scrabble Players Association Word List 2023

The list of allowable words is usually updated every five years. Since the fifth edition (CSW19) there was an intercalary sixth edition (CSW21) whose purpose was to expunge over 400 words whose sole definition is derogatory or demeaning. In 2024 the seventh edition (CSW24) was published with 1,814 new words, 845 of which are up to eight letters in length. T

Two update kits are PDF files with a lot of explanation of the CSW24 update. Chris Lipe, the WESPA Chair created an Initiation Kit (31 pages)
Tony Kalayzich and David Sutton created a much extended version, Complete New Words (115 pages)

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Books

Collins Official Scrabble Words

The seventh edition word list (CSW24) has words up to 15 letters long, including inflected forms. There are more than 290,000 words.
Buy from Amazon or Harper Collins

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Collins Scrabble Dictionary

This book is a dictionary with short definitions of all words of two to nine letters in length
Buy from Amazon or Harper Collins

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Electronic Resources

There are electronic resources which can be used to check words, do postmortems and generate special lists. At this date, the following have options for several lexicons including CSW24.

• Computers
  • Zyzzyva MacOS or Windows 64 bit by NASPA games
    Judge, Search (Pattern, Anagram etc), Definitions , Quiz
• iOS
  • Zyzzyva by NASPA games
    Judge, Search (Pattern, Anagram etc), Definitions, Quiz
  • ULU by Seth Lipkin
    Judge, Search (Pattern, Anagram etc), Definitions, Quiz
• Android
  • Word Checker by Pisanu Chaloemrattanaporn
    Judge, Search (Pattern, Anagram etc), Some definitions,Quiz
    For tournament use disable definitions
  • Zyzzyva by NASPA Games
    Judge, Search (Pattern, Anagram etc), Definitions, Quiz
  • Word App Pro by Craig Hart
    Judge, Search (Pattern, Anagram etc),Definitions, Quiz
  • Word Expert by Pisanu Chaloemrattanaporn
    Judge, Search (Pattern, Anagram etc), Some definitions,Quiz

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Printable lists

Here are some lists for CSW24 suitable for printing. Each list will open in your browser, and you print it from there. By using a judicious adjustment of scale, margins, omitting headers, orientation and so on, you can get it how you like. You could even print to a PDF. CSW21 deletions are grey, CSW24 additions are bold.