Methodology

This page describes the algorithms behind the tools, so you can understand — and trust — the results. All of it runs in your browser; none of it depends on an external service.

Word search placement

Puzzles are built with an overlap-aware, seeded placement strategy rather than blind random tries:

1. Words are sorted longest-first, because long words are the hardest to fit.
2. For each word, every legal position and direction on the grid is enumerated.
3. Positions that overlap letters already placed are preferred, which keeps puzzles compact and interlocking.
4. A bounded number of attempts is made per word.
5. Any word that still cannot be placed is reported to you rather than silently dropped.

Remaining empty cells are filled with random letters. A seed drives all randomness, so the same words with the same settings always produce the identical puzzle — that is what lets you rebuild or share an exact puzzle.

Word search solving

To find words in a pasted grid, the solver scans every cell; wherever a cell matches a word's first letter, it tests all eight directions (horizontal, vertical, both diagonals, and each in reverse). Matches are reported with start and end coordinates. Grids above 2,500 cells are rejected to keep the page responsive.

Anagrams and unscrambling

Each word and your pool of letters are converted into a 26-slot "letter signature" — a count of how many of each letter they contain. A word is buildable when its counts fit within the pool, with wildcards covering any shortfall. This count-based test is far faster than generating permutations and scales comfortably to a full rack of letters.

Crossword pattern matching

A pattern such as c??e becomes a fixed length plus a per-position letter constraint, where ? _ . * all mean "unknown". The dictionary is filtered in a single pass, after which optional start, end, contains, and excludes filters are applied. This version does not interpret clue meanings; it is a pure pattern search.

Wordle logic

For each guess, greens fix a letter at a position, yellows require the letter elsewhere, and grays cap how many times a letter may appear. Crucially, a letter can be green or yellow in one spot and gray in another; the solver derives a minimum and maximum count per letter so duplicate letters are handled exactly as the game does. A candidate survives only if it satisfies every guess.

Scrambles and missing letters

Scrambling uses an unbiased Fisher–Yates shuffle, re-shuffling if the result equals the original so the answer is never given away (words made of a single repeated letter are the only exception). Missing-letter worksheets blank random positions chosen from the letters you allow, so regenerating produces a fresh challenge.

How results are ordered

• Word finders group results by length and list the longest words first.
• Within a group, and in the crossword solver, words are ordered alphabetically.
• Ties are broken alphabetically so ordering is stable and predictable.

Known limitations

• Results are only as complete as the bundled word list, which is curated and compact — see the sources page. Uncommon or specialised words may be missing.
• The crossword solver matches letters, not clue meanings.
• The Wordle solver assumes standard rules and a five-letter answer.
• Very large word searches or grids are capped to protect performance on modest devices.
• Proper nouns, hyphenated words, and inflected forms may not all be present.