Every word game lives or dies by its dictionary. Use the wrong words and players feel cheated. Miss the obvious ones and they feel insulted. Get it right and the dictionary becomes invisible — players just feel the game is fair.
Building Luma's dictionary took seven months and involved one linguist, three playtesters, and more spreadsheets than anyone should ever maintain.
Why we didn't use an existing word list
There are well-known word game dictionaries — the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary, TWL, SOWPODS. We looked at all of them. None of them felt right for Luma.
They were either too permissive (obscure technical terms, archaic spellings that nobody recognises) or too restrictive (excluding words that every English speaker knows). They were also designed for competition, not for a game that rewards vocabulary knowledge over strategic tile placement.
What makes a word "fair"
We hired Ana, a computational linguist, to help us define fairness. Her framework: a word is fair in Luma if a literate adult English speaker would recognise it upon seeing it, even if they wouldn't use it in conversation.
This ruled out specialist vocabulary (medical terms, scientific nomenclature), proper nouns, and words that only appear in crossword dictionaries. It kept in idioms, compound words, and informal words that have genuine cultural currency.
The emotional part
Removing words was harder than adding them. Every word we cut felt like a small argument with language itself. Why shouldn't "zariba" be in there? It's a real word. But nobody knows it, and finding it as a valid answer would feel like a cheat, not a reward.
We settled at 12,247 words. Not because we ran out of words — because we ran out of words we were confident were fair.