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Credits

Some of the data and recordings on this site come from other people's work. This page credits them and reproduces the licences they were shared under.

The CMU Pronouncing Dictionary

The Major System games turn words into numbers by how the words sound. The pronunciations come from the Carnegie Mellon Pronouncing Dictionary (CMUdict), maintained by the Speech Group in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. Each word's number was worked out from its pronunciation, and only common words were kept. No pronunciations are reproduced.

From the dictionary's README:

The Carnegie Mellon Pronouncing Dictionary, in its current and
previous versions is Copyright (C) 1993-2014 by Carnegie Mellon
University.  Use of this dictionary for any research or commercial
purpose is completely unrestricted.  If you make use of or
redistribute this material we request that you acknowledge its
origin in your descriptions.

The dictionary's licence:

Copyright (C) 1993-2015 Carnegie Mellon University. All rights reserved.

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions
are met:

1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright
   notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
   The contents of this file are deemed to be source code.

2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright
   notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in
   the documentation and/or other materials provided with the
   distribution.

This work was supported in part by funding from the Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency, the Office of Naval Research and the National
Science Foundation of the United States of America, and by member
companies of the Carnegie Mellon Sphinx Speech Consortium. We acknowledge
the contributions of many volunteers to the expansion and improvement of
this dictionary.

THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY ``AS IS'' AND
ANY EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO,
THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR
PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED.  IN NO EVENT SHALL CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY
NOR ITS EMPLOYEES BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL,
SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT
LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE,
DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY
THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT
(INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE
OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.

To keep to common words, the list was checked against Open English WordNet 2025, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International, and the SCOWL word lists. Their notices are on the word list credits page.

Memordle's word lists

Memordle takes its guesses from the SCOWL (Spell Checker Oriented Word Lists) 2020.12.07 word lists, every five-letter word up to size 70. Its answers are the common words of SCOWL's size 10, 20 and 35 lists, and its rarer words those of the size 40 to 60 lists, that are headwords in Open English WordNet 2025, which is derived from Princeton WordNet and licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International. Changes were made: only plain five-letter words were kept, plurals, past tenses and unsuitable words were left out, and the answers were reviewed by hand. No definitions are reproduced.

Open English WordNet's notice:

This software and database is being provided to you, the LICENSEE, by
the Open English Wordnet team under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
International License (CC-BY 4.0).

Open English Wordnet 2023 Copyright 2023 by the Open English Wordnet team.

Permission to use, copy, modify and distribute this software and
database and its documentation for any purpose and without fee or
royalty is hereby granted, provided that you agree to comply with
the following copyright notice and statements, including the disclaimer,
and that the same appear on ALL copies of the software, database and
documentation, including modifications that you make for internal
use or for distribution.

WordNet 3.1 Copyright 2011 by Princeton University.  All rights reserved.

THIS SOFTWARE AND DATABASE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND PRINCETON
UNIVERSITY MAKES NO REPRESENTATIONS OR WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED.  BY WAY OF EXAMPLE, BUT NOT LIMITATION, PRINCETON
UNIVERSITY MAKES NO REPRESENTATIONS OR WARRANTIES OF MERCHANT-
ABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PARTICULAR PURPOSE OR THAT THE USE
OF THE LICENSED SOFTWARE, DATABASE OR DOCUMENTATION WILL NOT
INFRINGE ANY THIRD PARTY PATENTS, COPYRIGHTS, TRADEMARKS OR
OTHER RIGHTS.

The name of Princeton University or Princeton may not be used in
advertising or publicity pertaining to distribution of the software
and/or database.  Title to copyright in this software, database and
any associated documentation shall at all times remain with
Princeton University and LICENSEE agrees to preserve same.

SCOWL's notice:

The collective work is Copyright 2000-2018 by Kevin Atkinson as well
as any of the copyrights mentioned below:

  Copyright 2000-2018 by Kevin Atkinson

  Permission to use, copy, modify, distribute and sell these word
  lists, the associated scripts, the output created from the scripts,
  and its documentation for any purpose is hereby granted without fee,
  provided that the above copyright notice appears in all copies and
  that both that copyright notice and this permission notice appear in
  supporting documentation. Kevin Atkinson makes no representations
  about the suitability of this array for any purpose. It is provided
  "as is" without express or implied warranty.

SCOWL draws on other word lists, and their own notices are listed in its Copyright file, which is part of the SCOWL download.

Rungs' words and clues

Rungs builds its ladders from the common four-letter words of SCOWL's size 10, 20 and 35 lists that are headwords in Open English WordNet 2025, and takes its tries from every four-letter word of SCOWL up to size 70. Its clues are the short definitions of Open English WordNet, under the same licence and notices as above. Changes were made: each definition was cut to its first clause, with parentheses and some closing phrases removed, definitions that were too long, rare, slangy or that named their own word were left out, and unsuitable words were left out by hand.

Constellations and star names

Star Charts draws the 88 constellations from the star map data of d3-celestial by Olaf Frohn. Its constellation figures follow the charts made by the IAU and Sky & Telescope magazine (Roger Sinnott & Rick Fienberg), and its star positions and magnitudes come from XHIP: An Extended Hipparcos Compilation (Anderson and Francis, 2012), through VizieR. Figures with more than twelve stars were cut down to their brightest, and each was redrawn to fit a small square.

d3-celestial's licence:

Copyright (c) 2015, Olaf Frohn
All rights reserved.

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:

1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.

2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.

3. Neither the name of the copyright holder nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.

THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS "AS IS" AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE COPYRIGHT HOLDER OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.

The names of bright stars, such as Betelgeuse and Vega, are from the IAU Catalog of Star Names (IAU-CSN), the version of 4 April 2022, by the IAU Working Group on Star Names (WGSN), licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International. The IAU does not endorse this site.

Bird songs in Dawn Chorus

Dawn Chorus plays short clips of bird song, cut from recordings shared on Wikimedia Commons. Each clip is shared under the same licence as the recording it was cut from, and is credited below with its recordist, its source and what was changed. The recordists do not endorse this site.

North America