Resources and Recipes

To help you understand ways to use xwordlist as well as provide support for common usage patterns, please see the recipe pages linked below. It is important to remember whenever you grab words from sites on the internet, the data is only as reliable as the site itself. We recommend that you check your lists before using them to construct puzzles and that you don’t use any entry before making sure it is both appropriate to your puzzle and thematic enough to warrant its use.

Recipes

For each recipe included in these pages, we have provided options that can be used to grab data from known webpages. Be sure to customize any links to the exact page(s) you want and to configure any output file names. The instructions given are specific to each site’s HTML when we created the recipes but of course, websites change. If you notice that one of the recipes is no longer working, don’t hesitate to open an issue and let us know.

In general, it is good to test the content before you turn it into a word list. To do this, first run xwordlist without the options for convert, strip, dedupe, alphabetize and case. After being certain that the content you are pulling makes sense for your word list, run it again with all options and you will have a word list.

We will be adding more sites over time, don’t hesitate to drop us a line if you are interested in a particular site.

  • Fandom - Pull reference text, tables of data and other information from the largest collection of fan specific wikis
  • IMDB - Get filmography and biographical data on actors, directors and other movie and television creators
  • LyricsFreak - Get lists of songs and the lyrics of most well-known musicians
  • SongLyrics - Get lists of songs and the lyrics of most well-known musicians
  • Wikipedia - Pull reference text, tables of data, lists of collaborators and other information from Wikipedia

Always read the terms of service first! Our inclusion of any website does not guarantee that pulling information programmatically is allowed under the site’s terms of service or that you won’t be blocked trying. We make no representations of anything; you’re on your own when use xwordlist and when you download data from public websites while using it.