How the Anvilgram Word List Is Built and Reviewed
Anvilgram is only as good as its words. This page explains where the list comes from, what gets admitted, how it is checked before every build, and what happens when something is wrong.
Original by design
Every entry is anvilgram-original: the clue, definition, and example sentence are written for this project, not copied from any dictionary, and are published under a project-owned licence. A one-to-one rights register tracks each entry against its licence record, so every word's provenance can be audited individually.
Admission rules
An answer must be a common English word of four to nine letters. British spelling is the editorial default, while established US variants remain valid answers when they are clear to UK and US players. We exclude proper nouns, brands, abbreviations, hyphenated forms, highly regional terms, and anything offensive. One more rule is structural: no two answers may share the same letter multiset, so a perfect rearrangement of the tiles is always the one reviewed target — never a coin flip between two words.
What difficulty means
Easy words are high-frequency everyday vocabulary. Medium words are common but less automatic — you know them, but they take a beat to recall. Hard words are less frequent yet still dictionary-common; we never pick obscurity for obscurity's sake.
Three languages, English answers
The interface and learning aids are available in English, Chinese, and Japanese, but every answer is an English word. The Chinese and Japanese material exists to help learners connect meaning to an English target — it never changes what the target is.
The automated pipeline
No word ships on good intentions. Before every build, scripts/validate-corpus.mjs re-checks the entire list: schema shape, the blocklist, anagram-collision detection, locale quality across all three languages, theme quotas, the one-to-one rights register, and a byte-sync check between the source data and what ships. A failed check stops the build.
Versioning
The corpus is versioned like software. The current release is 2026.08.01-2: 974 reviewed words across 10 themes. New batches bump the version, and the record of what changed travels with the release.
The daily schedule contract
Daily puzzles follow a deterministic 730-day schedule: no answer repeats within any rolling 90-day window, and no five-word set ever repeats. The schedule ships with the game so that it works offline; it is not a secret, and it hides nothing a determined reader could not find. Fairness comes from everyone getting the same words on the same day, not from concealment.
Takedown
If you believe an entry violates these rules — a rights problem, an offensive sense, a misjudged difficulty — report it through the issue tracker of the project's public repository (wwa12/anvilgram). Disputed entries are removed or corrected in the next batch, and the register records the change.