Far Out knows which words go together because of work other people shared freely. These are the sources, what each one gives the game, and the terms it comes with.
ConceptNet
Everyday, common-sense links between words: the kind a dictionary leaves out, like fork and eat.
This work includes data from ConceptNet 5, compiled by the Commonsense Computing Initiative. ConceptNet is freely available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license (CC BY-SA 4.0) from conceptnet.io.
Reference: Robyn Speer, Joshua Chin and Catherine Havasi, “ConceptNet 5.5: An Open Multilingual Graph of General Knowledge”, AAAI 2017.
WordNet
Synonyms, “is a kind of” and “is part of” relations, and the definitions used to spot related words.
WordNet 3.0, © 2006 Princeton University. WordNet is made available under its own permissive licence, which asks that the copyright notice and permission notice stay with any copy. The licence · wordnet.princeton.edu
Moby Thesaurus
Extra synonym links. The Moby Project by Grady Ward is in the public domain.
GloVe
The measure of how far apart two words are, which is what the reach score and the leap colours are built on.
GloVe word vectors, by Jeffrey Pennington, Richard Socher and Christopher Manning (Stanford NLP, 2014). Released under the Public Domain Dedication and License. nlp.stanford.edu/projects/glove
wordfreq
Used while building the game to choose which words are common enough to include, so you are not asked about obscure ones. By Robyn Speer; its code is under the Apache licence and its data under CC BY-SA 4.0. wordfreq is built from word counts in sources such as SUBTLEX, OpenSubtitles and Google Books Ngrams, whose authors deserve a mention too. github.com/rspeer/wordfreq
The word data in this game
The links and word distances Far Out ships (words.json, links.bin and vectors.bin) are built from the sources above, ConceptNet among them, so they are shared under CC BY-SA 4.0: you may copy and adapt them, with credit, under the same licence.