Terms of Use

Using the site

Wordton is free to use and needs no account. You may look up as many words as you like, copy lists out of it, and use what you find in puzzles, games, homework, crosswords, or anything else. We ask only that you do not hammer the site with automated requests to the point where it stops working for other people.

The word list

Searches run against ENABLE, the Enhanced North American Benchmark Lexicon, a word list of roughly 172,800 entries released into the public domain. Nobody owns it and nobody needs to license it, which is the reason this site uses it. Words are words; what we have built is the search, not the language.

ENABLE has not been revised since 1997, so we add a supplement of 487 modern words it never had: blog, app, podcast, emoji and the rest. That list is ours, hand-checked against mainstream dictionaries, and the method is written down in the data folder of this site's source. It is a small piece of editorial work rather than a licensed product, and you are welcome to the words in it, which are of course not ours either.

The definitions

Short definitions come from WordNet 3.1, made by Princeton University and used under the WordNet license, which permits use and redistribution with attribution. That attribution appears in the footer of every page on this site. WordNet is a research lexicon rather than a dictionary of record: it is accurate but sometimes terse, and it occasionally lacks an entry for a word the list contains. Where a definition is missing, the page says so rather than inventing one.

Who we are not

Wordton is not affiliated with The New York Times, or with any of the publishers whose puzzles we write hints for. Wordle, Connections, Strands, the Mini Crossword and Pips are the New York Times' games. Quordle belongs to its own publisher. We do not host, reproduce, or run any of those games. Their names appear here because they are the names of the puzzles people are asking about, which is the only way to write a hint page anyone can find.

The daily hints are our own writing about a puzzle, in the way a review is a writer's own work about a film.

The hints

Hints are written by hand each morning and checked before publishing, and they are provided as they are, with no guarantee. If a hint is wrong we want to know and we will correct it, but nothing here is a promise that you will solve the puzzle. Answers always sit behind a reveal you have to open on purpose; that is a design decision described on the about page, and it is the one thing on this site we consider a commitment.

Availability

This is a small site run by a small number of people. It may go down, it may be slow, and a page may occasionally be missing something. We will fix what we can when we can, and we make no promise about uptime.

Getting in touch

Questions, corrections and complaints all go to the same place: contact@wordton.com.