findfiveletterwords.com

A free, frequency-sorted word finder and word-list library for Wordle, Scrabble, Words With Friends, and crosswords. ~183,000 words, 2 to 20 letters, 1,732 statically generated pages.

Live preview (temporary, noindexed): https://niranjan-gopal.github.io/findfiveletterwords.com/

What makes it different

• Frequency order, not alphabetical. Every list is ranked by how often each word appears in the Norvig trillion-word corpus, so likely puzzle answers sit in the first rows.
• Five dictionaries behind one switch: combined tournament list (default), Wordle answers, Words With Friends (ENABLE), Scrabble US (TWL06), Scrabble UK (SOWPODS/CSW). Encoded as bitmask flags so the whole solver runs client-side from one small JSON per length.
• Accessibility-first UI: light/dark themes with muted dark-mode palette, 4-step text-size control, fully remappable keyboard shortcuts (? opens the list), reduced-motion support, labelled controls throughout.

Stack

Astro 6 (fully static output) · Tailwind CSS 4 · no backend, no analytics scripts. The interactive finder is plain TypeScript in one inline module.

Development

Requires Node >= 22.12.

npm install
npm run dev        # localhost:4321
npm run build      # production build (site: findfiveletterwords.com, base: /)
npm run preview

Regenerating the word data

node scripts/build-wordlists.mjs

Downloads (cached in scripts/raw/, gitignored) ENABLE1, TWL06 (norvig.com/ngrams/TWL06.txt -- the wordgamedictionary.com mirror is truncated, do not use it), SOWPODS, the Wordle answer list, the Norvig count_1w frequency table, and the LDNOOBW blocklist. Emits src/data/words-N.json (page lists, ENABLE ∪ TWL) and src/data/dicts-N.json (solver data with dictionary flags) for N = 2..20. Lengths 16-20 exist only in ENABLE; Scrabble lists stop at the 15-square board.

Deployment

Now: GitHub project pages (feedback round)

.github/workflows/deploy.yml deploys on every push to main. It builds with GITHUB_PAGES=true, which:

• sets site: https://niranjan-gopal.github.io, base: /findfiveletterwords.com (the repo name must stay findfiveletterwords.com for the base to match);
• adds <meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow"> to every page;
• keeps every <link rel="canonical"> pointing at https://findfiveletterwords.com;
• overwrites robots.txt with Disallow: /.

So even if the preview stays up longer than planned, Google will not index it and it cannot create a duplicate of the future production site.

One-time repo setup: Settings → Pages → Source: GitHub Actions.

Unpublishing when the feedback round is over (manual, ~10 seconds):

gh api -X DELETE repos/niranjan-gopal/findfiveletterwords.com/pages
gh repo edit niranjan-gopal/findfiveletterwords.com --visibility private --accept-visibility-change-consequences

Later: the real domain (Cloudflare Pages)

1. Buy findfiveletterwords.com, create a Cloudflare Pages project, build command npm run build, output dist -- without the GITHUB_PAGES env var. base returns to / and the url() helper in src/lib/url.ts becomes a no-op; nothing else changes.
2. Redirect the *.pages.dev preview subdomain to the custom domain (Bulk Redirects, or a _redirects file) so it never competes in search.
3. Google Search Console: verify the domain, submit /sitemap-index.xml.
4. Set up contact@findfiveletterwords.com email forwarding.
5. Apply for AdSense once pages are indexed.

Internal links and the base path

All internal links go through url() from src/lib/url.ts, which prefixes the configured base. Markdown content keeps plain root-relative links; a rehype plugin in astro.config.mjs prefixes those at build time. Canonical URLs are built with canonicalUrl() and always point at the production domain.

Project layout

scripts/build-wordlists.mjs   word-data pipeline (run manually when sources change)
src/data/                     generated words-N.json / dicts-N.json (committed)
src/lib/words.ts              lengths, dictionaries, points tables
src/lib/pages.ts              the 1,700-page programmatic page definitions
src/lib/url.ts                base-path + canonical helpers
src/pages/data/               JSON endpoint serving dicts-N.json to the finder
src/layouts/BaseLayout.astro  shell: header, ticker, footer, shortcuts, theming
src/content/blog/             editorial articles (Markdown)