Note: the wildcard character is a dot: ”.”, not a question mark. To specify any number of characters, say ”.*” rather than “*”.
See our FAQ Document.
For more powerful searching, you can try our Dictionary Grep/Search - Advanced.
The dictionaries available at the moment are:
There is a page where you can read about and download these dictionaries/wordlists. You should at least look at the background information about these lists before deciding to trust them.
The search string can just be a plain string, such as “gai”, which will return “gaiety”, “assegai”, and “regain”, among other words, but it can also be a regular expression. Regular expressions are powerful tools for searching patterns. I don't have space here for a full explanation of regular expressions, but I hope to provide support for questions about them soon. If you know how to use them, go ahead. If not, here are a few references:
Single quotes are ignored in the pattern. This is to avoid a security issue. Quotes appear in very few entries in any case, and can still be matched, either by a dot, or by a circumlocution such as [^a-zA-z \-\!], which will match odd characters.
The UK cryptics list, in addition, contains some special characters, namely these: Åàäâåáçéêèîïñöôóûùü. The “no accents” version in the list converts these to their normal plain text equivalents.
The case sensitivity option should be self explanatory. The third choice permits you to logically reverse the sense of the test: if you specify a search string of “e” and “don't match” then you will only get words without an “e” in them.
For more powerful searching, you can try our Dictionary Grep/Search - Advanced.
You can specify the word length to return. The length is tested after any conversions caused by query type, above, so with “consonants only” selected, “tit for tat” will only be found if the word length is set to 6.
The result always shows you how many words match. To speed things up, however, you may sometimes not want to see the actual words; for example if you're trying to determine frequency counts. You can specify “count of matching words” to avoid generating the word list. This is particularly useful if you might otherwise return lists of hundreds of thousands of words.