About the word lists: SCOWL and SALDO, sizes and licences
Where the English and Swedish word lists come from, what was filtered out, how big each list is by word length, and the licences that apply.
Published 17 October 2026
English: SCOWL and ESDB
The English list is made from SCOWL, now built from the English Speller Database (ESDB) by Kevin Atkinson. We use size 60, which is the default, with US and GB(-ise) spelling and no special lists. After filtering it has 81,072 words.
Larger sizes add rarer words and smaller sizes keep only the most common ones. Size 60 is a middle choice: broad enough to include everyday words and many uncommon ones without the obscure end of the dictionary.
English words by length
The filtered English list, one file per word length:
- 3 letters: 750 words
- 4 letters: 2,699 words
- 5 letters: 5,185 words
- 6 letters: 8,427 words
- 7 letters: 11,759 words
- 8 letters: 12,923 words
- 9 letters: 12,037 words
- 10 letters: 10,056 words
Swedish: SALDO
The Swedish list comes from SALDO's morphology (saldom.xml), a lexicon from Språkbanken Text at the University of Gothenburg with 128,036 entries and every inflected form of each. After filtering it has 398,800 words. Inflection is why a lexicon of 128 thousand entries yields several times as many word forms.
Swedish words by length
The filtered Swedish list, one file per word length:
- 3 letters: 963 words
- 4 letters: 3,596 words
- 5 letters: 9,543 words
- 6 letters: 19,527 words
- 7 letters: 29,363 words
- 8 letters: 39,397 words
- 9 letters: 48,471 words
- 10 letters: 53,793 words
Licences
SCOWL and ESDB, Copyright 2000-2026 Kevin Atkinson: permission to use, copy, modify, distribute and sell word lists created from them is granted without fee, provided the copyright and permission notices are kept. The notice ships with the list in /words/en/LICENSE.txt.
SALDO's morphology is licensed CC BY 4.0. Attribution: Språkbanken (2017). SALDO's morphology. Enriched and distributed by Språkbanken. The attribution ships in /words/sv/LICENSE.txt. Our derived list is shared under the same licence.
Rebuilding the lists
The lists are generated by a script in the repository that reads the SCOWL file and the SALDO XML, applies the filters described on the method page and writes the files. Running it again with the same sources produces the same files.