dankpuzzles

word game helpers that respect the letters

Crossword pattern search

Type the letters you have in place and a ? (or .) for each empty square. The length is the number of squares.

3 to 15 squares

The empty squares…optional

… type a pattern Words of 3 to 15 letters from the ENABLE list, A to Z. Letters in red are the ones that fill your empty squares.

How it works

Each character of the pattern is one square. A letter is a square you have filled; ?, ., _, - or * is an empty one. Spaces are ignored, so c ? o ? s and C.O.S mean the same five squares. A word fits when it has exactly that many letters and every filled square matches.

Worked example. c?o?s has 18 matches in the list: CHOPS, CHOWS, CIONS, CLODS, CLOGS, CLONS, CLOPS, CLOTS, CLOYS, COOFS, COOKS, COOLS, COOPS, COOTS, CROCS, CROPS, CROSS and CROWS. An empty square may repeat a letter you already have, which is why CROSS and COOPS are there.

Narrowing it down. If a crossing answer tells you the second square is not an H, type h under cannot be: CHOPS and CHOWS drop out, 16 remain. If you know a W goes somewhere in the gaps, type w under must include: only CHOWS and CROWS are left. Both boxes look at the empty squares only; repeat a letter (ee) to need it twice.

Longer entries. ?u?z?e gives GUZZLE, MUZZLE, NUZZLE and PUZZLE. A pattern with few filled squares can return hundreds of words: s?????e? has 916, so fill in a crossing letter before you scroll.

Sharing a search. dankpuzzles.com/crossword/#c?o?s opens with the pattern filled in. The part after # stays in your browser and never reaches the server.

What this cannot do

  • It does not read clues. It lists every word that fits the squares; choosing the one that answers the clue is your part. For a clue with a well-known answer, an AI chat can guess the meaning, but it regularly suggests words of the wrong length or with a letter in the wrong square. This page never does.
  • No phrases, names or abbreviations. ENABLE is a Scrabble-style list of single words with no proper nouns, so multi-word answers (AS IS), names (OSLO, ERIE), abbreviations and prefixes that newspaper crosswords love are missing.
  • Plenty of obscure words. The list has 172,823 words, many of them rare (CIONS, CLONS, COOFS above). A match here is a real word, not necessarily one a setter would use.
  • 3 to 15 letters only. A standard grid is 15 squares wide, and the site ships ENABLE’s 3- to 15-letter words (168,348 of them). Longer answers in 21×21 Sunday-size grids are not covered.
  • Slurs are removed. 107 racial, ethnic, homophobic, transphobic and ableist slurs (and their plural or -ed forms) are dropped before the list reaches your browser, so they never appear even when they fit. Profanity that is not a slur is kept.
  • A to Z only. Accented letters and digits are ignored.

Where the words come from

The list is enable1.txt from the dolph/dictionary repository on GitHub, pinned to one commit and checked by hash, then split into one file per length. The page downloads only the file for your pattern’s length, from this site; your pattern is never sent anywhere.

source=dolph/dictionary/enable1.txt (ENABLE, public domain) commit=c65f04b0b5b27a981f437b940cf62fe71320d5ec fetched=2026-09-29 rows=172823 sha256=3f16130220645692ed49c7134e24a18504c2ca55b3c012f7290e3e77c63b1a89 kept=3:966,4:3887,5:8614,6:15211,7:23089,8:28410,9:24867,10:20296,11:15504,12:11358,13:7827,14:5127,15:3192 filtered=107