# Licence Notice — Year 4 Speed Spelling — Word Data This file credits every source used to build `data/words.json` and explains how the word lists were curated and filtered. Generated: 2026-09-02. **Final contents:** 100 statutory words (50 medium / 50 hard) and 1,000 curated dictionary words (400 easy / 350 medium / 250 hard). All arrays are lowercase, alphabetically sorted, unique, letters `a–z` only, no word longer than 12 letters. --- ## Source 1 — UK National Curriculum statutory spellings (Years 3–4) - **What:** the statutory "Word list – years 3 and 4" from *English Appendix 1: Spelling*, part of the National Curriculum in England: English programmes of study. - **Publisher / copyright:** Department for Education (DfE), Crown copyright. - **Page:** - **Verified against the official PDF:** - **Licence:** Open Government Licence v3.0 (**SPDX: `OGL-UK-3.0`**). > Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. ### How it was used The list was verified directly against the official DfE PDF, which contains **exactly 100 entries**. One game word was taken per entry; compound entries were reduced to their most challenging single form: | DfE entry | Word used | | --- | --- | | accident(ally) | accidentally | | actual(ly) | actually | | busy/business | business | | eight/eighth | eighth | | forward(s) | forward | | occasion(ally) | occasionally | | possess(ion) | possession | | though/although | though | | woman/women | women | The 100 words were split into difficulty tiers by judgement for age 8–9: **medium** (50 — more regular patterns) and **hard** (50 — silent letters, doubled letters, ie/ei, -ough words, unusual spellings). British spellings (e.g. *centre*, *favourite*) are kept. **Note on the project brief:** the brief's inline copy of the list accidentally mixed in some Year 5–6 statutory words (*accommodate, achieve, aggressive, ancient, available*…) and omitted genuine Year 3–4 words (*accidentally, actually, answer, busy/business, centre, heard, remember, sentence*). The verified official DfE list is used instead; the secondary variant forms (accident, actual, busy, eight, forwards, occasion, possess, although, woman) and *rough* (present in some unofficial copies of the list, but not in the DfE PDF) were excluded from the dictionary as well. --- ## Source 2 — `word-list` by sindresorhus (the "dictionary" source) - **What:** a single plain-text list of 274,136 English words, used as the membership dictionary for the curated common words. - **Repo:** (npm package `word-list`) - **Word list:** - **Licence file:** - **Licence:** MIT (**SPDX: `MIT`**). Full licence text as found in the repo: ``` MIT License Copyright (c) Sindre Sorhus (https://sindresorhus.com) Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions: The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE. ``` ### How it was used A hand-curated seed vocabulary (~1,850 words across themes: animals, food, home, school, nature, weather, actions, feelings, body, colours, numbers, time, places, transport, clothes, sports, people, music, story words) was filtered down to 1,000 words. **Every final dictionary word was verified to be a member of the MIT word-list.** One seed (*knob*) was not in the word-list and was dropped. --- ## Curation & filtering rules **Statutory list (100 words)** - Taken one-per-entry from the verified DfE list (see table above). - Split 50/50 into medium/hard tiers by age-appropriateness judgement. **Dictionary (1,000 words)** — all of the following were applied: - Length 3–10 letters, lowercase, `a–z` only (no spaces, hyphens, apostrophes). - Membership in the MIT word-list verified word-by-word. - **Required blocklist enforced:** kill, gun, drug, beer, wine, vodka, smoke, porn, sex, naked, die, dead, bloody, hell, damn, stupid, hate, war, bomb, knife, suicide. - **Additional curated exclusions:** violence and weapons (fight, punch, sword, arrow, shoot…), alcohol and smoking (drunk, cider, pub, cigar…), gambling (casino, bet…), death and funerals (grave, funeral, zombie…), insults and body-shaming (ugly, fat, idiot, loser…), toilet humour (fart, poo…), and other sensitive terms (prison, poison, devil…). - No proper nouns, contractions, hyphenated words, or confusing fragments. - Any overlap with the statutory list was removed (the dictionary is entirely extra to the statutory words). - A final manual sensitive-substring scan was run over the finished list; the only remaining hits are innocent everyday words that merely *contain* a sensitive string (e.g. **ro**bin, gra**pe**, s**poo**n, **poo**l, bum**py**, a**crop**… — acrobat, gravel, hoodie, ingredient, stable, teaspoon, wardrobe). - Difficulty tiers by length: **easy** = 3–4 letters (400 words), **medium** = 5–6 letters (350 words), **hard** = 7–10 letters (250 words). Long "showcase" words children love (butterfly, helicopter, watermelon, dinosaur…) are protected in the hard tier; the remainder were sampled evenly across the alphabet. ### UK-English QA edits (post-curation) A UK-English audit of the finished game replaced two US-English survivors in `dictionary.hard`: **airplane → airport** (the UK form *aeroplane* was already in the list) and **apartment → cellar** (*apartment* has no tier-appropriate UK counterpart; *flat* is too short for the hard tier). Tier counts were preserved (250 hard), so the final contents stay 100 statutory + 1,000 dictionary words. *Airport* and *cellar* are ordinary common English words and are members of the MIT word-list. --- ## Sources considered but not used - **Hugging Face datasets** `StephanAkkerman/english-words-IPA` and `jimbowyer123/english-words` (both tagged MIT on the Hugging Face Hub). Skipped because `sindresorhus/word-list` is the most reliable single-file source and was sufficient; no additional licence obligations arise. - **Unofficial mirrors of the statutory list** (school websites, worksheet sites): not needed — the official DfE PDF itself was fetched and parsed successfully. --- ## Attribution line for the game (copy/paste) > Word data for UK Year 4 (age 8–9). Statutory spellings © Crown copyright, > Department for Education, *English Appendix 1: Spelling*, used under the Open > Government Licence v3.0 . > Curated dictionary words verified against [sindresorhus/word-list](https://github.com/sindresorhus/word-list) (MIT licence).