The Word Checker tells you in a second whether a word is in our list of more than 268,000 English words of 2 to 15 letters. You also see what the word means, its letter points in classic tile games and in Words With Friends, and, if the word is not in the list, the closest real words.

How to use it

Type a word and press Check. You can check up to ten words at once: separate them with spaces.
A green tick means the word is valid. The label common word means it is used every day; rare word means it is real but old, technical or very uncommon.
Under the word you find its meanings as a noun, verb or adjective, and a link to every word you can make from its letters.
A red cross means the word is not in our list. The checker then suggests words that differ by one letter, by a missing or extra letter, or by two swapped letters, so a typo is easy to fix.

Settling arguments over the board

Word games end in arguments about whether a word is real more often than about anything else. Our list is built for word games: it includes plurals and verb forms (cats, ran, running) and the short words players love, such as qi, za and xu, but it leaves out names, abbreviations and words with hyphens or apostrophes. Official tournament word lists differ a little from each other and from ours, so for a club or tournament game, agree before you start which list counts.

Letter points

The checker adds up the classic tile values (Q and Z are worth 10, X and J are worth 8) and the slightly different Words With Friends values. These are the points of the letters alone, before any bonus squares on the board.

The meanings come from Open English WordNet 2024, based on Princeton WordNet (licence CC BY 4.0); we show at most two meanings and shorten some of them. Need a word instead of checking one? Try the Random Word Generator or find words from your letters with the Word Finder.