12/1/21 update

[brookehusic]

hi everyone,

thanks again for your interest in spread the word(list) and welcome to our december update! download the lowercase list here and the uppercase list here. as always, please email us with any published puzzles you've used our wordlist for so we can list them in our gallery!

after pushing today's update, our wordlist now has 257,724 answers, with 88,822 scored 50 or higher! if you noticed the latter is slightly lower than last month's number, it's because we're still filtering out variant spellings and theme answers that have slipped into the 50+ category. some highlights, now ranked at 50 or higher: CHU, TANIA, CISHET, ALT TEXT, YOU RULE, RAMEN EGG, TRANS PRIDE, DEMISEXUAL, BABY MONITOR, HERE WE GO AGAIN!

we wanted to say a few words about what we're trying to do with this project:

- on the development end, we've endeavored to make the updating process as automatic as possible. this means you're going to see some mistakes such as misclassified theme answers and variant spellings. we're working on writing code to filter these things out, but since we're not going through them by hand you still may come across some while we're improving things on the back end. this should only get better with every update!

- the type of puzzle we think our wordlist will be best suited for is a USAT-style/early week themed puzzle. our main goal is to provide constructors with a resource that's cleaner than what else is out there, especially for short fill (length 3-6). in our algorithm, we try to uprank as many answers as possible that we feel confident are "clean fill" based on precedent. unlike with peter broda's or xwordinfo's list, we haven't designated a higher scoring tier for flashy/fun answers; instead, we encourage you to check out the several seed lists on our resources page and develop your own seed list with answers you've always wanted to see in puzzles

- given the above: if, while constructing, you prefer to see many options and curate them yourself on the fly, then some of the other wordlists on our resources page are worth checking out as a substitute for or in combination with ours. we've heard great things about using peter broda's list for this type of constructing

happy filling, and see you next month!

brooke & enrique