Welcome to the home page of Zyzzyva, a word study program I've written. Zyzzyva is free software available under the GNU General Public License. Zyzzyva has been tested under Linux, Windows XP, Windows 2000, Windows 98, Windows ME, Mac OS X 10.3.9 or later (Panther), Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger), and Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard). Installers are provided for all supported platforms, and the latest source code is also available as listed below. It is recommended that you install Zyzzyva on a computer with at least 32 MB of memory (64 MB would probably be better).
Zyzzyva's OWL2+LWL lexicon is 100% accurate as verified by the metrics available on the NSA Dictionary Committee's website. Zyzzyva has been used successfully as a Word Judge at many North American SCRABBLE® tournaments, including BAT, Oregon TILE, the Dallas Open, the U.S. SCRABBLE® Open and the National School SCRABBLE® Championship! Everyone's comments about using Zyzzyva in a club or tournament setting have been very positive. If you are running a tournament and would like to use Zyzzyva as a Word Judge program, please feel free to do so.
If you find Zyzzyva useful, I would be very happy to receive a donation via PayPal, which you can do by clicking the button below. Thank you for your support!
The latest stable release of Zyzzyva is 2.0.4 (released 2008-12-26).
Installers and source code are available as listed below. Unless you're actually doing Zyzzyva program development, you should only need an installer.
Installers
Source Code
For installers and source code of previous Zyzzyva releases, go here.
Help documentation can be found online for the following versions:
Audio files (mp3) for studying OWL2 words can be found here.
Here are some screenshots of Zyzzyva in action. Click the small images to reveal full-size images.
Quiz with tile images |
Analyze quiz performance |
Look up word definitions, hooks, extensions |
Search for words in one lexicon but not another (e.g. Collins-only words) |
Search for multiple conditions simultaneously |
Search with wildcard matches grouped together |
Word Judge input screen |
Word Judge "acceptable" judgment |
Word Judge "unacceptable" judgment |
"Zyzzyva" is the last word in the English language, alphabetically. Okay, okay, "zyzzyvas" (its plural form) comes later. Okay, okay, some dictionaries list "zzz" after that. Let's just say "zyzzyva" is the coolest word at the end of the alphabet.
I created Zyzzyva because I wanted a program for studying SCRABBLE® words. There are several programs available, but all of them either lack features I wanted or do not run on Linux. I therefore took it upon myself to create the program I wanted, and Zyzzyva is the result. I have made it available under the GNU GPL because I feel that others should be able to benefit freely from my work.
Please send bug reports, feature requests, patches, pizza, etc. to Michael W Thelen at mthelen @ gmail . com. I will try to reply as quickly as I can. If you're feeling particularly generous, I would be very happy to receive a donation via PayPal, which you can do by clicking the button below. Thank you for your interest in Zyzzyva, and I hope you find it useful!