Crossword helper
Type the word as it looks in the grid, with ? where you do not know the letter.
Type ? for unknown letters, e.g. c?ll?. Use * for any number of letters.
Type at least two characters.
Missing a word? Tell us anonymously
How it works
The crossword helper finds every word with exactly the length and letters you enter. Type c?ll? for example to find five-letter words starting with c and with ll in third and fourth position.
If you only know the beginning or the end, use * for any number of letters, such as pre* or *ing.
The word list includes inflected forms such as cars and driven, which is often exactly what the crossword wants.
How the pattern is read
The pattern is lowercased. A question mark, full stop or underscore stands for exactly one letter, and an asterisk for any number of letters, including none. Spaces, digits and punctuation are removed, so c ? l l ? with spaces is the same as c?ll? and gives ten words: calla, calli, calls, cella, celli, cello, cells, colly, culls and cully. Letters outside the list’s alphabet are removed too, but a note under the field names them, so café is searched for as caf. The lists contain no spaces or hyphens, so answers of more than one word cannot be found.
The pattern then becomes a regular expression that must match the whole word, with a full stop for each unknown letter and a full stop followed by an asterisk for the asterisk. Without an asterisk, only the list of the right length is loaded. With one, the lists from the number of letters and question marks in the pattern up to the longest words in the list, 20 letters, are loaded. The pattern *ing finds 14,266 words, 192 of them with 16 to 20 letters.
What the English list contains
The English list has 207,457 words of 2 to 20 letters, merged from ENABLE and the English Speller Database. It includes inflected forms such as cars and driven, and both British and American spellings: colour and color, metre, tyre, kerb, grey and cheque are all there, so a pattern such as col??r and col?r each find a match. If a word is missing, you can suggest it below the results.
Results are shown 200 at a time, grouped by length when the pattern has an asterisk. Each result links to Wiktionary, where you can check what the word means before writing it in.
Sources
- wordlist_swedish
- SALDO (Språkbanken Text)
- ENABLE
- English Speller Database (SCOWL)
- Norsk ordbank (Språkrådet, UiB)
- Det Centrale Ordregister
- german-wordlist
- OpenTaal
- paroleitaliane
- Morphalou 3.1 (ATILF)
- LibreOffice pt_BR (VERO)
- SJP.PL (LibreOffice pl_PL)
- Rospell (LibreOffice ro)
- Wiktionary (kaikki.org)
- ECMAScript Language Specification – RegExp (Regular Expression) Objects