W
ESPOwords
Play your friends. That's it.
Free · no ads · no hints for sale

A word game with the people you actually know.

Take turns building words on the board. Nothing interrupts you: there are no ads, no coins, no power-ups, no treasure chests, no strangers, and no chat for anyone to work you in. You play the people you invite, and that is the whole product.

We ask for an email and a password so your games follow you between your phone and your laptop. That is the only reason. We do not send email, we do not sell or share anything, and there is no third-party tracking in this page.

No game open

Pick a game from the Games tab, or start a new one.

Nothing open

Open a game from the Games tab and you can talk to whoever you are playing.

Look a word up

Any word, any time — before or after you play it. This tells you whether a word is in the list. It will never tell you what to play: there are no hints in this game and there never will be.

Two word lists, both in the open

Loading…

Standard is that list exactly as it was released in 1997 — nothing added, nothing taken away. Wide open is the same list plus the supplement below. You pick which one a game uses when you start it.

Every other word game keeps one secret list, so a rejected word feels like a rigged machine. We keep two, print both, and let you choose. Open the standard list

Everything Wide open adds

The 1997 list has no OK, no ZEN, no APP, no ONLINE, no TEXTED — and it is missing nine of the two-letter words every modern game allows. Here is the entire supplement, every word of it. Nothing is hidden and nothing is ever taken away.

Playing a word your friends allow that is not here? Ask for it on the You page and it goes in, with your name on it.

How the board works

Our own board and our own tiles, not a copy of anyone's. 60 premium squares, arranged symmetrically. The centre square pays no bonus, so going first is not an advantage. Using all seven tiles in one turn pays 40. Tiles are drawn from the bag at random with the same shuffle for both players, and neither of us can see the bag.

You

Setting this up for someone else

Make their account here on your own computer, then send them their sign-in link. They tap it once on their phone and they are in — no email to type, no password to remember, nothing to lose. The link keeps working, so if their phone ever forgets them, the same message lets them straight back in.

What we do not do

No ads, anywhere, ever — not between turns, not to see your own move, not for a reward. No coins, no power-ups, no hint tools sold back to you. No bots dressed up as people: every opponent here is a person you invited. No stranger matchmaking and no chat, which is how the scams in these games find people. No analytics, no ad SDKs, no third-party scripts on this page. We do not sell or share anything, because we do not collect anything to sell.

Your email is a login and nothing else. We never send to it.

What should we add? What should we take away?

This game gets built by the people playing it. Say what you want and it goes on the list with your name on it — and when it turns up in the game, everyone knows whose idea it was.

On the list so far
Something wrong?

If a word was rejected that you believe is real, or anything here behaves badly, that is a bug and we fix it. This game exists because the big ones stopped being pleasant to play.