Count the squares twice
Almost every disappointing search is an off-by-one on the length. Count the squares in the grid rather than counting the letters you have written, then check the characters you typed match.
Pattern matching
Crossword solver
Type what the crossing answers have given you and a question mark for every square still empty. The length of what you type is the length of the answer, so C?T looks for three-letter words starting with C and ending in T, and nothing else.
- 171,280
- Words searched, from two letters up to fifteen
- 28,506
- Eight-letter words, the most numerous length and the hardest to guess blind
- No proper nouns
- Our list is a word-game list, so place names and people are not in it
Getting the most from it
Three habits that make pattern searching work
Put in the vowels you are sure of
A single confirmed vowel in the right position cuts the candidate list by roughly eighty percent. Consonants help less than you would think, because English repeats a small set of them constantly.
Work from the crossings inward
Fill in every letter the crossing answers have confirmed before you search, even the ones that feel unhelpful. Two scattered letters in a nine-square answer usually leaves a list short enough to read.
What this cannot do
It matches letters, not meanings. It has no idea what your clue says, so it cannot rank the results by which one fits the definition, and with a sparse pattern it will hand you a long list where only one entry makes sense. That last step is yours, and it is the part worth doing.
Reference
Endings that solve crosswords
Grid fill is not random. Setters need words that interlock, which pushes them towards a predictable set of endings, and knowing them lets you guess a pattern before you have the crossings.
If an eight-square answer has an I in position five and a G at the end, it is almost certainly something -ING. If a nine-square answer ends in N, -TION and -SION are the first two things to try. The same handful of tails accounts for a large share of long entries in any puzzle.
Worth trying as patterns
- ?????ing for eight-letter present participles
- ????tion and ?????tion for the noun forms setters love
- ??????ly for adverbs, which fill awkward corners neatly
- un?????? and re?????? for the two most common prefixes
- ?????ness for the abstract nouns that turn up in themed grids
The single letter that matters most
A final S. It is the most common last letter in English and the easiest crossing to establish, and once you have it you know you are looking at a plural or a third-person verb, which halves the possible meanings before you have read the clue again.
Related tools
- Anagrams for cryptic fodder
- Unscrambler from a set of letters
- Wordle five letters, coloured clues
- Jumble newspaper scrambles
Every result here opens a definition when you click it, which is often enough to confirm you have the right answer without leaving the page.
Questions
About crossword searching
How do I write the pattern?
Put in the letters you already have and a question mark for every empty square. A seven-letter answer where you know the first letter is a C and the fifth is an A becomes C???A??. The number of characters you type is the length of the answer, so getting the count right matters more than anything else.
Full stops and underscores work as gaps too, since those are what people tend to type without thinking about it.
Can I search by length alone?
Yes. A pattern of nothing but question marks returns every word of that length, which is occasionally what you want when you have a definition in mind and no crossing letters yet. Six question marks gives you all 15,235 six-letter words, so you will want at least one real letter before the list is much use.
Why is my crossword answer not in the list?
Crosswords use a much broader vocabulary than word games do. Proper nouns are fair game in a crossword and are excluded from every tournament word list, so a clue answering PARIS or NEWTON will never appear here. The same goes for abbreviations, foreign words, multi-word answers and the deliberately obscure fill that shows up in the corners of a themed grid.
If the pattern is right and nothing sensible comes back, a proper noun is the most likely explanation.
Does this help with cryptic crosswords?
Only for the final step. A cryptic clue has to be unpicked into a definition and a piece of wordplay before you know what you are looking for, and no pattern matcher can do that part. Once you have worked out the answer is nine letters starting with I, this will narrow the field.
For the anagram half of a cryptic clue, the anagram solver is the better tool, since anagram fodder is usually spelled out in the clue.
Can I combine a pattern with letters I know are in there somewhere?
You can. Open the extra filters and use the contains field alongside the pattern. That is useful when a crossing answer has told you the word includes a Z but not where the Z sits.
What is the longest answer it will handle?
Fifteen letters, which covers the long across entries in a standard fifteen by fifteen grid. Sunday sized puzzles occasionally run to twenty-one squares, and those are beyond what our word list holds as single words.