Slow Squares

Credits

Last updated November 12, 2026

Slow Squares is built on other people’s carefully made things — word lists, pictures, typefaces. This page names them all in one place, with the licences they came under and what we changed. The short version: thank you.

The word lists

Two games are built on these lists. Five letters takes its word of the day from them, and Word search builds its grids from the same words and checks every grid against every word the lists hold, so that no other word hides in it.

The English daily words in Five letters are drawn from the English Speller Database (ESDB, long known as SCOWL) — © 2000–2026 Kevin Atkinson, used under its MIT-style licence. The list is modified: narrowed to common five-letter base forms, curated by hand and shuffled once. Every accepted English guess comes from dwyl/english-words (the Unlicense), filtered to five letters.

The Polish words come from the word-game dictionary („Słownik do gier”) of SJP.PL, used under CC BY 4.0. That list is modified too: narrowed to five-letter words and filtered, with the daily pool hand-picked from it.

The Spanish words — the daily words and the accepted guesses alike — come from the hunspell-es dictionary of RLA-ES (Recursos Lingüísticos Abiertos del Español), version 2.9. It is offered under three licences (GPL 3+, LGPL 3+ and MPL 1.1); we use it under the Mozilla Public License 1.1. The list is modified: expanded to every five-letter form the dictionary accepts, written without accents (the ñ is kept), with the daily pool hand-picked from the dictionary’s headwords and shuffled once. The modified list stays under the MPL 1.1 and is available on request. The pick was made with the help of the FrequencyWords lists by Hermit Dave (the Spanish OpenSubtitles 2018 list), released under CC BY-SA 4.0, used only to rank the candidate words by how common they are. Nothing from that list is copied into the site, but the selection is derived from it, which is why it is named here.

The Hungarian words come from Magyar Ispell, the Hungarian hunspell dictionary written by László Németh and Ferenc Godó, version 1.9. It is offered under two licences (MPL 2.0 and LGPL 3+); we use it under the Mozilla Public License 2.0. The lists are modified: expanded to every five-letter form the dictionary accepts on its own — its compounds and its proper nouns left out — with the daily pool picked by hand from the dictionary’s base forms, read through by a native speaker and shuffled once. The accents stay: á é í ó ö ő ú ü ű are letters of the Hungarian alphabet, not marks on other letters. The modified lists stay under the MPL 2.0 and are available on request. The pick was made with the help of the same FrequencyWords lists by Hermit Dave (the Hungarian OpenSubtitles 2018 list), released under CC BY-SA 4.0, used only to rank the candidates.

The German words come from the German Wiktionary, written by its contributors, in the machine-readable extract published by kaikki.org (wiktextract, from the dump of 1 September 2026). Wiktionary’s text is offered under two licences (CC BY-SA 4.0 and the GFDL); we use it under CC BY-SA 4.0. The lists are modified: reduced to the five-letter German forms Wiktionary lists, inflections included — proper names, abbreviations, obsolete spellings and every word with ß left out — with the daily pool picked by hand from its base forms and shuffled once. Ä, ö and ü stay: they are letters with keys of their own. The modified lists stay under CC BY-SA 4.0 and are available on request. The pick leaned on two more lists: dys2p’s German word lists (de-7776), dedicated to the public domain under CC0, as a second opinion on which words everybody knows, and the same FrequencyWords lists by Hermit Dave (the German OpenSubtitles 2018 list), released under CC BY-SA 4.0, used only to rank the candidates.

The French words — the daily words and the accepted guesses alike — come from the French spelling dictionary of Grammalecte (“Dictionnaires orthographiques français”, the “classique” variant) by Olivier R., version 7.7, in the copy LibreOffice ships. It is offered under the Mozilla Public License 2.0. The list is modified: expanded to every five-letter form the dictionary accepts, written without accents or cedilla and with the ligatures spelled out (cœur becomes COEUR), with the daily pool hand-picked from the dictionary’s headwords and shuffled once. The modified list stays under the MPL 2.0 and is available on request. The pick was made with the help of the same FrequencyWords lists by Hermit Dave (the French OpenSubtitles 2018 list), released under CC BY-SA 4.0, used only to rank the candidates.

The Nonogram pictures

The Nonogram pictures come from game-icons.net, drawn by named authors and licensed under CC BY 3.0 — or from the editor here, drawn by people who offered them for the daily pool and credited by the name they gave, if they gave one. Each day’s picture carries its credit where it appears — on the finish card, in the archive and on the printed sheet; this page is the standing thank-you.

The Nonograms among the boards from the Beethoven film are our own drawings. Six of them make one picture between them, after the portrait of Ludwig van Beethoven by Joseph Karl Stieler (1820), which is in the public domain.

The maps

The maps on the pages about the Solar System to scale and the Solar System at the scale of Zielona Góra, and the city boundary on the second, come from OpenStreetMap, © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database License (ODbL). The boundary is thinned to one point every fifty metres.

The towns that the search on the Solar System page can find — their names and where they are — come from GeoNames (geonames.org), licensed under CC BY 4.0. The list is modified: shortened and reshaped so that your browser can search it on its own.

The satellite photos that the Solar System page can show in place of the street map come from Google Maps; the map names Google and the makers of each photo in its corner, as Google asks.

The planets, moons and orbits

The sizes, distances and orbits of the planets, moons and dwarf planets on the page about the Solar System to scale come from NASA: the planetary fact sheets of the NASA Space Science Data Coordinated Archive (NSSDCA), compiled by David R. Williams, and the Solar System Dynamics group at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which publishes E. M. Standish’s Keplerian elements for approximate positions of the major planets, the planetary satellite parameters and the Small-Body Database. They are public data, used here with thanks. The Sun’s diameter follows the measurement by Emilio, Kuhn, Bush and Scholl (2012), and the sizes of Haumea and Eris come from measurements made as they passed in front of a star (Proudfoot, Grundy, Rommel, Fernández-Valenzuela and others, 2026; Sicardy, Ortiz and others, 2011). Where each body is on a given date is worked out from the elements above, and our Moon’s place from the lunar theory in Jean Meeus’s Astronomical Algorithms, approximately: near enough for a map. The spacecraft’s positions and paths come from the Horizons System (NASA/JPL Solar System Dynamics), which publishes the trajectories worked out by each mission’s navigators; where its tables end, we carry the paths of the five craft leaving the Solar System on in straight lines.

The photos of the examples

The photos of the places in the Solar System to scale’s examples (in the examples menu, on the welcome card, beside the description of the open example, on each example’s own page and on its share card) come from Wikimedia Commons, each under the licence its author chose. We made them smaller and cropped them, and on the share cards we set our own text beside them. Every version we made of a CC BY-SA photo is shared under that same licence.

The typefaces

The site is set in Sora by Jonathan Barnbrook and Julián Moncada (© The Sora Project Authors) and Spectral by Production Type (© The Spectral Project Authors), both under the SIL Open Font License 1.1.