Great Dictionary Reset of August 2024

The Great Dictionary Reset of August 2024, commonly referred to as "the cull" and "the purge", was a significant overhaul made to Oxford Dictionaries Premium, carried out by Oxford University Press (OUP) on 16 July 2024. It involved over 95,000 words, predominantly of an obscure nature, instantly being deleted from the site without prior notice. This has since dramatically affected the maxes available in letters games, as well as the number of valid conundrums, on both Countdown and Apterous.

Ultimately, the justification for the removals was the complexity they added to OUP's update processes. The legacy status of the entries meant OUP had not been actively updating them, and they were therefore deemed unsuitable to retain.

Background

In mid-2015, a year after Countdown switched to Oxford Dictionaries Online (ODO), thousands of words — taken from the Oxford English Dictionary — were unexpectedly added to the website overnight. The entries were all highly obscure and/or archaic, and were often accompanied by a multitude of spelling variants. Notably, none of them included audio pronunciations on the website.