The NWL2023 Dictionary: What Makes a Word Valid in Squaredle
If you’ve ever typed a word you were sure was real and had Squaredle reject it — or been surprised that some obscure term was accepted — the explanation almost always comes down to one thing: the dictionary being checked against.
What NWL2023 Actually Is
NWL2023 stands for the NASPA Word List, 2023 edition — the official tournament word list maintained by the North American Scrabble Players Association (NASPA). It’s the same word list used in competitive North American Scrabble, which is why it’s such a natural fit for a letter-connection puzzle like Squaredle: it’s a rigorously maintained, unambiguous list of exactly which strings of letters count as valid words, with no room for personal interpretation.
How Big Is It?
The full NWL2023 list contains roughly 195,000 words. Restricted to words four letters or longer — the range relevant to grid puzzles like Squaredle — it’s still close to 194,000 entries, spanning word lengths from 4 letters all the way up to 15.
| Word length | Approximate count in NWL2023 |
|---|---|
| 4 letters | ~4,100 |
| 5 letters | ~9,300 |
| 6 letters | ~16,400 |
| 7 letters | ~25,100 |
| 8 letters | ~31,300 |
| 9 letters | ~31,100 |
| 10 letters | ~25,000 |
| 11–15 letters | ~51,400 combined |
Nine-letter words are actually the single most common length in the entire list — slightly ahead of eight-letter words — which is worth keeping in mind on 5×5 grids where longer paths are more achievable.
Why Some “Real” Words Get Rejected
A handful of exclusion rules explain most of the “wait, that’s not a word?” moments:
- No proper nouns. Names of people, places, and brands aren’t in a Scrabble-derived list, since they’re capitalized words by convention.
- No hyphenated words. Compound words joined by a hyphen aren’t included as single dictionary entries.
- Regional and archaic entries are still in — just rare. Unlike a strict “American English only” dictionary, NWL2023 keeps a long tail of older, informal, or non-American spellings specifically because Scrabble players need an exhaustive, dispute-free list. That long tail is exactly where most Squaredle bonus words come from.
Where Definitions Come From
When Squaredle shows a definition for a word you’ve found, that definition is sourced from Wiktionary rather than a curated in-house dictionary. This is why definitions can occasionally look a little different in tone from a traditional print dictionary — but it also means even the most obscure bonus words usually come with at least a basic explanation.
Why This Matters for Solving
Understanding that the checker is a fixed, exhaustive list — not a judgment call — changes how you approach uncertain words. If a string of connected letters looks like it should spell something, it’s worth trying even if you’ve never seen the word before, because NWL2023 includes a huge number of legitimate but low-frequency words. Our Squaredle Solver uses this exact same NWL2023 list, so any word our tool surfaces is guaranteed to be accepted by the actual game.