Find Words

If you want to find words that match a specific pattern you can use the Find Word... command on the Words menu.

Enter a pattern as the search word, and it will then find words that match, e.g.

Use * to stand for any number of letters, and ? for one unknown letter. You can also use groups of alternative letters, just include the group within square brackets. Use @ to stand for any vowel and # to stand for a consonant. Use ^ as "not" before a letter or group. E.g.

* can stand for any number of letters, including no letters. If you wish to find a word starting with an L and ending in an N at least two letters behind the L, you can enter *L??*N. This will find, for example, ALIEN which has two letters between the L and N, and ALLERGEN which has many letters between them. *L*N would include words like KILN in the list, where the L and N follow each other.

Force punctuation (;); Put a semicolon at the start of the search pattern to force the matched words to have exactly the punctuation of the search pattern. Otherwise, it will be punctuation insensitive. E.g. ;????? finds all five-letter words without any punctuation. ????? on its own would include words like at bay.

Case sensitive (:) Put a colon at the start of the search pattern to make it case-sensitive.

Regular expressions: (\) Do powerful regular expression searches by prefixing the search pattern with a backslash (advanced users only!)

By default the found words are sorted alphabetically. Select the sort by length option if you prefer them to be sorted by length (shortest matches first).

You can set the minimum and maximum word lengths of words to find by changing the settings in the relevant box. Once you have entered a search pattern you can look in any of the available word lists by clicking on the tabs with the word list names.

To change the letters which are counted as vowels (the @ symbol), right click anywhere in the Find Words window except on the list box, and click the Set vowels... menu item. Enter the letters that you want. Consonants are defined as non-vowels (e.g. # equals ^@).

If you select one or more of the found words you can press the Copy button to copy it/them to the clipboard, or if you used Find Word with the cursor in a suitable slot in the grid you can Insert the word directly. If you copy a word with the Clue Editor open you can then paste it into the Clue Editor as part of a clue.

If you want to find words to fit in the puzzle it is easier to use the AutoFind facility.

You can save the found words to a text file by right-clicking on the list, selecting Save found words..., and entering a name for the file to save them to. Alternatively select Copy all to clipboard from the same right-click menu. You can select multiple words by holding down the Ctrl key while you click on different words; the right-click then offers an option to delete or copy the selected words.

If your search comes up with a word that you want to remove from the word list just select the word and press Delete. It will be removed form the word list in which it was found.