Word Finder

What this does

You give it a handful of letters; it checks all 172,749 words in a public-domain English lexicon and keeps every one you could actually spell from them. Words are grouped by length, longest group first, because length is what wins tile games — a seven-letter play that uses your whole rack is worth more than a clever three-letter one almost every time.

Blanks

A ?, an asterisk, or a plain space all mean "any letter". Three is the cap, which is one more than a standard Scrabble set gives you and enough for every other game here.

Blanks are scored honestly. A blank tile is worth zero points no matter which letter it stands for, so when a word needs one the finder removes the value of that word's most expensive letter before totalling. Spell quartz with a real Q and it is 24; spell it with a blank Q and it is 14. Tools that skip this step will happily tell you a word is worth twice what you will actually score.

The four filters

They combine, and each one is for a specific situation:

• Starts with — you are hooking onto a letter already on the board, or you know the first letter of a puzzle answer.
• Contains — a run of letters somewhere in the middle. An underscore stands for one unknown letter, so t_e finds the, tie and toe, and str finds every word with that cluster anywhere in it.
• Ends with — the fastest way to length. Searching your rack plus an ing, ers or ies ending usually surfaces a play two letters longer than you had spotted.
• Length — pin it to the gap you are filling.

When the finder and your game disagree

It will happen occasionally. This site searches ENABLE, which is public domain; Scrabble, Words With Friends and the rest each license their own list, and those lists differ at the edges — mostly around very new words, dialect spellings and two-letter oddities. Read a match here as "this is an English word", not "this will be accepted", and check the game's own dictionary when a play actually matters.