Family-safe by design: how every word in Akshara is screened

A word game for families cannot rely on luck. The three-layer screening pipeline that checks every word, every meaning, and every level in Telugu, Hindi and English.

By the Akshara team · Published 2026-09-26 · All articles

Akshara was built to be played by families — our own first players were parents. That sets a bar most word games quietly avoid: it is not enough for the game to be fun; every word on every board, and every definition on every meanings screen, in three languages, has to be something you would be comfortable reading aloud at a dinner table. Here is how that is actually enforced.

Layer one: the word lists

The obvious layer. Profanity, slurs, sexual and drug vocabulary are excluded from the playable vocabulary in all three languages — including romanized and regional variants that generic English-only filters miss. Telugu and Hindi needed their own lists, built for this game, because no off-the-shelf family filter exists for them at useful quality.

Layer two: the meanings

The layer most games skip. An entirely innocent word can carry an inappropriate definition in a raw dictionary — everyday English words often lead with anatomical or adult senses in scholarly sources. So the definitions themselves pass a screening gate: every meaning shown in the game is checked against the same standard as the words, and the build fails — the game literally cannot be released — if a definition violates it. Where a flagged term is legitimate linguistics (the name of a diacritic, a word that simply means "obscene" in a dictionary-appropriate way), it is reviewed and allowed knowingly, not by accident.

Layer three: the levels

When screening catches a word that is already on a shipped board, we do not swap in a replacement word and hope the level still holds together — the whole level is withdrawn. Level identity is never reshuffled: your level 205 stays your level 205, and your progress is never confused by renumbering. This is why Akshara's total level count occasionally goes down between releases. We think a family game that prunes itself honestly is worth more than a bigger number on a store listing.

What this does not claim

No screening of tens of thousands of words across three living languages is beyond error, and machine-assembled dictionary data is not a human editor's approval — our About page says exactly that. What we can promise is the system: every word screened, every meaning gated, every failure withdrawn rather than patched, and every report from a player checked and fixed in the next release. If you ever see a word or meaning in Akshara that you would not want your child to read, write to us via the contact page — it will be acted on.