Word Finder (Crossword & 5-Letter Helper)

About the Word Finder (Crossword & 5-Letter Helper)

Stuck on a crossword or word game? Type the letters you know with ? for each missing one — c?t, s??r?, ??ing — or use * for any number of letters, as in *ology. Add letters the word must or must not contain, how it starts or ends, and a length. Results are grouped by length, with the most common words first and in bold, so the likely answer is at the top instead of buried among rare words.

The 5-letter word helper is for guessing games such as Wordle: type each guess, tap its letters to mark them grey, yellow or green, and see every word that still fits — with suggested next guesses that split the remaining words best. The word list is SCOWL (115,000 English words, American and British spellings), and everything runs in your browser.

Common uses

• Crosswords, cryptic crosswords and fill-in puzzles when you know some of the letters.
• Five-letter guessing games (Wordle and similar), Hangman and word ladders.
• Finding words with a given ending or prefix for poetry, puns, names and teaching.
• Scrabble and Words With Friends practice: words that use, or avoid, particular letters.

How patterns work

• ?, _ or . stands for exactly one letter: c?t finds cat, cot and cut.
• * stands for any number of letters, including none: *ology finds biology and zoology; un*able finds words starting with un and ending with able.
• Without *, the pattern sets the word length; with *, use Shortest and Longest.
• Letters to include may appear anywhere in the word; type ee to require two e’s. Letters to exclude must not appear at all.

Searches ignore capitals and spaces in the pattern. Results are single words written with the letters a–z: hyphenated words and phrases are not included, and words with accents are listed without them, the way crossword grids write them (café as cafe, fiancé as fiance).

How the 5-letter helper reads the colours

Green means the letter is in that position. Yellow means the word contains the letter, but not in that position. Grey means the word does not contain the letter — unless the same guess also shows that letter in green or yellow: then grey means the word has no more copies of it than the coloured ones. For example, guessing speed against the answer abide shows the first e yellow and the second grey, so the answer has exactly one e.

Suggested next guesses are the possible words whose letters appear in about half of the remaining words, in common positions — guessing them rules out the most words on average. Likely answers uses common words only, the way these games choose answers; switch to Every five-letter word if the answer is unusual.

About the word list

SCOWL (Spell Checker Oriented Word Lists) by Kevin Atkinson grades English words by how common they are, from size 10 (the most common) to 70 (rare). Common words uses sizes up to 35, Standard dictionary up to 50, Large dictionary up to 60, and Everything all 115,000 words, including plurals and other forms. American, British, Canadian and Australian spellings are all included. Hide vulgar and offensive words (on by default) leaves out profanity and slurs.

Limitations

• This is not an official Scrabble or tournament dictionary (such as NWL or Collins), so a few valid game words are missing and a few listed words may not be allowed in a particular game.
• Proper nouns, abbreviations, hyphenated words and phrases are not included, so crossword answers that are names or several words will not be found.
• The 5-letter helper does not know a game’s official answer list; Likely answers is an approximation using common words.

Privacy

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