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A word pattern search finds every word that fits a shape you already know part of. Write the letters you have and a token for each one you do not: ? for exactly one letter, * for any run of letters, @ for any vowel, # for any consonant. The pattern is matched against 77,636 single-word dictionary entries and up to 300 matches come back, commonest first.
Write a pattern above. Matching words appear here, commonest first.
| Token | Matches | Example | Finds |
|---|---|---|---|
| ? | Exactly one letter | st??e | stone, stage, stale |
| * | Any run of letters, including none | *ology | biology, psychology, ology |
| @ | Any vowel: a e i o u | b@ll | ball, bell, bill, bull |
| # | Any consonant: the other twenty-one letters | #ight | light, night, right, sight |
The pattern is compiled into a regular expression on the server. The compiler reads your input one character at a time and keeps only letters a–z and the four tokens; everything else is discarded rather than escaped. That means the compiled expression can only ever contain letters and four fixed character classes, and there is no route from what you type to a regex metacharacter — which is why the box takes anything you paste into it without complaint.
When a pattern begins with a known letter, the scan runs inside that letter’s block of the index rather than over the whole thing. A pattern starting with s reads about eight thousand entries instead of 77,636; a pattern starting with x reads a couple of hundred. Patterns that begin with a wildcard have no such shortcut and scan the whole index, which is still fast enough to answer while you type. The tool reports how many entries it read under every result set.
Length is bounded before the expression runs: a pattern with no * can only match words of exactly its own length, so words of any other length are skipped without being tested at all.
The 77,636 AltF Lexicon entries whose headword is a single unbroken run of a–z, from 1 to 31 letters. That deliberately excludes phrases, hyphenated compounds and anything with an apostrophe or a digit, because none of them can be written into a crossword grid one letter per square.
If you would rather browse than search, the dictionary also keeps precomputed lists by length, first letter and last letter. Word lists has all of them.
The word list comes from Princeton University’s WordNet, with commonness bands derived from a frequency corpus of everyday English. Definitions and pronunciations on the linked entry pages come from WordNet and the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. Full sources and licences.