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Rahul M. Shah
2026-06-09ai-gaming

game-ready-dictionary

Words: 148Format: Hot Take

The part nobody mentions about building word games: the words.

You can have clean state, smooth animations, a beautiful UI. And then the player types "ZOEAE" and you need to know in under a millisecond whether that's valid.

I ran into this on four games back to back. Wordle Clone. Semantic Echo. Lexicon Crawler. DropQuote Architect. Each one needed a fast, reliable word corpus. Each time I solved it differently and slightly wrong.

So I packaged it properly.

game-ready-dictionary is a pre-compiled Trie. Lookup time is O(m), where m is the length of the word. Not the size of the word list. That distinction matters when you're validating on every keystroke in a live game.

It ships with ENABLE1 and SCOWL word lists baked in, both US and UK dialects. Small enough for mobile, drop-in ready for web.

Don't build the plumbing again.

github.com/stonedhawk/game-ready-dictionary

Hashtags

#gamedev #indiegame #opensource #javascript #wordgame

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