What resources can you recommend for finding words based on knowing some of its letters? [closed]

Question

Are there any websites that allow searching for a word based on only knowing, let us say, the second character, the third character and the total number of characters?

I thought about this while solving a crossword today, but could not find such a tool on the internet.

Answer 1

I think your question is not about spell checking per se.

Nevertheless you can use this site: Regex Dictionary

But you will need to know how to form Regular Expressions to be of use.

But as a quick example to represent a 7-letter word starting with 'a' and having an 'st' in the 4th and 5th places you would use:

^a..st..$

(The ^ and $ denote the beginning and end of word, and a dot matches any single character.)

You would find that alastor and apostle both match.

Have Fun.

Answer 2

OneLook.com allows you to use wildcard characters when searching for words; examples are provided on the splash page.

Answer 3

Ok, I found Spellino, which suits best for me, as it shows images and Onelook is also quite comfy to use.

Answer 4

By coincidence I read this article yesterday: a good summary would be Hangman: you're doing it wrong. It specifically tackles the relative frequencies of letters in individual words (rather than passages of text), in words of various lengths, and in words known to already contain certain letters. Unlike hangman, in a crossword puzzle knowing the second letter is A doesn't give you information about any other letters in the word, but I think the approach taken here is still useful.