words

In Hanging with Friends, you are limited to the words you can make based on the words you are given. A fun fact I was able to calculate is that the highest point word possible in my dictionary is ZYZZYVAS. If you get the letters to make this word AND a triple word bonus, you’ll rack up 129 points. But if you were to pick that word, I guess it in only a few guesses. I’ll not even bother doing a real calculation of the probability of being able to make that word, since I’m pretty sure getting 3 Zs in Hanging with Friends is pretty much impossible.

The rest of the top highest points Hanging with Friends words are listed below. But don’t count on being able to play many of them anytime soon, since they require pretty rare occurences.

Word	MaxPoints
zyzzyvas	129
zyzzyva	126
jazzlike	120
pizazzy	117
quizzing	117
zizzling	117
bezazzes	114
jazzman	114
jazzmen	114
pazazzes	114
pizazzes	114
jazzily	111
jazzing	111
bezazz	108
pazazz	108
pizazz	108
quizzed	108
quizzers	108
zizzled	108
buzzwigs	105
jazziest	105
quizzer	105
quizzes	105
zizzles	105

The highest points word I recall playing is JAROVIZE for 90 points. What’s your highest points Hanging with Friends word?

Picking words for high points isn’t often the same as picking words that are hard to guess. Do you want points or do you want to win Hanging with Friends? I want both, and that’s often the conflict in Hanging with Friends.

The actual Hanging with Friends dictionary is not published online (that I could find). But Zynga bases their dictionary on the widely available Enhanced North American Benchmark LExicon (ENABLE). I downloaded it from here. The ENABLE word list I downloaded consists of 172,820 words. But Hanging with Friends restricts their word list to only words with 4,5,6,7 or 8 letters. This narrows the dictionary significantly. In addition, according to Zynga’s Words with Friends rule book,

Words With Friends has more than 173,000 acceptable words for use in the game. Our list is based on the Enhanced North American Benchmark Lexicon (ENABLE), a public domain list used by many word games. Tap here to visit the site where the original ENABLE list resides. We’ve added a few of our own words to game such as ‘zen’ and ‘texting,’ and more words may be added in the future. If you’d like to suggest a word, you can do that here.

I don’t have access to the exact list of words they added. I hunted around the internets and added a few more words from wordlists I found. They additionally state they have removed, “derogatory words and racial slurs.” I did a quick google search to try to find a list of these types of words to remove from my list. But I didn’t find a comprehensive list. As a result, I left all the bad words in my dictionary. Perhaps, I should have looked harder since in an upcoming post on the “hardest words” to guess, I’ll have to get out my red pen and censor my own post!

My end result is a dictionary of 82,555 words. Here’s the first look, of many, at some statistics about these words.

Length	Number
4	4,031
5	8,939
6	15,788
7	24,029
8	29,768

And here’s a histogram (a histogram is a fancy word for bar graph. We mathematicians like to use fancy words. Did I mention I’m a mathematician? Well, now you know.

Here are a few additional fast facts about the letter distributions in my dictionary. Some of these may turn out to be quite useful for our later discussions.

Letter	Words Containing	Total Number	Number in WWF
a	38,256	45,266	9
b	11,656	12,848	2
c	18,507	20,204	2
d	20,612	23,059	5
e	51,126	65,991	13
f	7,554	8,584	2
g	14,834	16,572	3
h	13,146	13,681	4
i	36,667	42,143	8
j	1,438	1,466	1
k	7,734	8,095	1
l	27,451	31,354	4
m	14,733	15,980	2
n	28,777	32,487	5
o	28,959	34,348	8
p	14,932	16,539	2
q	1,009	1,009	1
r	35,460	40,412	6
s	42,659	52,497	5
t	28,045	32,164	7
u	19,344	20,578	4
v	5,180	5,347	2
w	6,483	6,657	2
x	1,827	1,837	1
y	9,999	10,253	2
z	2,218	2,523	1

What’s all this mean for your strategies when building and guessing words? Well that’s what we’re here to explore. And these statistics are only the tip of the iceberg. Stay tuned.

Hanging with Friends Word Builder Cheat	Hanging with Friends Word Solver Cheat
Hanging with Friends Word Yakking	Scramble with Friends Cheats

Highest Points Hanging with Friends Words (You won’t ever make them!)

Basics about my Hanging with Friends dictionary