Word finder

What the word finder does

The word finder searches the dictionary by shape rather than by rack. Give it a pattern such as ?a?e? and it returns every five-letter word with A in the second position and E in the fourth. Give it no pattern but a starting letter, an ending letter, a contained fragment or a length range, and it returns every word that satisfies those filters. The two approaches combine freely, so you can ask for seven-letter words starting with UN that contain ING and fit a pattern at the same time.

How to use it

1. Type a pattern into the box, using a question mark for each unknown letter. The pattern fixes the length of the word.
2. Or leave the pattern empty and open the filters: starts with, ends with, contains, and a length such as 6 or 5-7.
3. Press Search. Results are sorted with common words first by default; switch to length, score or alphabetical order in the filters.
4. Click a word to copy it or to open its unscramble page.

Examples

A crossword clue with the grid showing ?a?e? yields WATER, PAPER, LATER, TAKEN and about 300 others, common ones first. Filtering by ends with ing and length 7 gives the seven-letter words that empty a rack holding ING. Contains qu with no length lists every word with that pair, from AQUA to the long scientific terms. If you know the first and last letters of a five-letter word, use the pattern s???e, or open the matching list page which has the same result with definitions and statistics.

Tips

• A pattern search is exact about length. If you are not sure of the length, leave the pattern empty and use a length range instead.
• The contains filter matches letters in order, so ar finds CART but not RAT. For "contains these letters anywhere", use the unscrambler with your letters and blanks.
• Common-first sorting is best for puzzles; score sorting is best for tile games.
• Very broad filters can return thousands of words. Add a second filter or a pattern to bring the list down to something readable.

Questions

What characters can the pattern contain?

Letters A to Z and question marks. Underscores, asterisks and full stops are accepted as blanks too. Anything else is ignored, and the tool tells you how many characters it dropped.

Is this the same as the unscrambler?

No. The unscrambler asks "what can I make from these tiles"; the word finder asks "what fits this shape". Use the finder for crosswords and known positions and the unscrambler for a rack of letters.

Where do the results come from?

The ENABLE public-domain word list, with commonness tiers from SCOWL and definitions from WordNet. Details and attributions are on the how it works page.