Crossword Solver

How pattern search works

You describe the answer square by square. Every character you type is one square: a letter if you know it, a dot if you do not. The finder then keeps every word of exactly that length whose letters line up with yours.

That makes length the most important thing you supply. ...e. and ....e. are completely different searches, and getting the count wrong is the single most common reason a solver comes back empty. Count the squares in the grid, not the letters in your guess.

Crossings do the heavy lifting

One known letter in a seven-letter answer leaves thousands of candidates. Three known letters usually leaves fewer than twenty. This is why it pays to fill in the easy crossing answers first even when they are not the ones you care about — each one you place turns an unusable list into a readable one.

Position matters as much as count. A known letter at the end of a word cuts the field far more than one in the middle, because English word endings are much less varied than their interiors.

Getting past a long result list

• Ends with — if the clue is plural or past tense, add an s or ed. This alone often takes a list of hundreds down to a handful.
• Contains — for a letter you are fairly sure about but do not want to commit to a position. Unlike the main pattern, this one floats.
• Read the clue's tense and number. A clue phrased in the plural takes a plural answer; a clue ending in a question mark is usually wordplay rather than a definition.

What this lexicon does not contain

The 172,749 words searched here come from ENABLE, a public-domain list of common English words and their inflections. It has no proper nouns — no people, places, brands, films or bands — and no abbreviations. Crosswords lean on all of those heavily, particularly in the short entries, so an answer that stubbornly refuses to appear is frequently a name rather than a word. When a pattern with several known letters returns nothing at all, that is usually the explanation.