Crossword Helper

This is a pattern-matching crossword helper. It searches a built-in dictionary of roughly 9,000 common English words from 3 to 7 letters and returns every one that fits your pattern. Use ? as a wildcard for each letter you do not know.

How it works: type the pattern with a ? in every unknown square. The length has to match exactly, so a five-character pattern only ever returns five-letter words.

Worked examples, all of them run against the actual dictionary rather than typed from memory:

Note how fast the list shrinks as crossing letters go in. ?I?E returns 66 words. Fill in one more square and you are usually down to a handful. That is the whole skill of using a tool like this: solve the crossings first and come here last, not the other way round.

The dictionary holds everyday vocabulary rather than specialised terms. There are no proper nouns, no obscure plurals, and nothing a cryptic setter dug out of a Victorian dictionary. For serious solving you want a dedicated tool with a hundred thousand entries.

Tips:

• Every ? you can remove cuts the result list by roughly a factor of ten
• An all-? pattern returns every word of that length, which is not useful
• Case is ignored, and spaces and punctuation are stripped before searching
• If nothing matches, one of the letters you were sure about is probably wrong

Why crosswords are good for the brain: solving puzzles draws on vocabulary recall, pattern recognition and lateral thinking. Regular solving has been linked in some studies to slower decline in verbal memory, though whether the puzzles cause it or word-minded people simply do more puzzles is still argued over. At minimum it is enjoyable and harmless.

History note: the first crossword was made by Arthur Wynne for the New York World on 21 December 1913. It was a diamond rather than a rectangle and had no internal black squares at all. The grid we now think of as standard, rectangular with rotational symmetry, took a couple of decades to settle.

For anagrams, cryptic wordplay and themed answers, no dictionary lookup helps. Those are creative problems. Pattern matching only assists with the straightforward fill-in-the-blank case.