How to Use Known Letters and Wildcards

Type the letters you already have in their correct positions, and use ?, _ or * for every square you do not know - you can mix any of these three wildcard characters freely within the same pattern. The length of your pattern tells the solver how many letters the answer must have, so leave a placeholder character for every blank square rather than skipping it.

What This Tool Can Help With

It's built for exactly the situation where you're partway through a crossword: you know some of the letters from crossing answers, but not the whole word. Enter what you have, and the solver returns every word in its dictionary that fits the pattern, so you can compare candidates against the clue yourself.

Example

Entering C_A_T finds five-letter words with C in the first position and A in the third, such as CHART or CRAFT. Entering A??LE finds five-letter words starting with A and ending in LE, such as ANKLE or ADDLE.

Why Use a Crossword Solver

A crossword solver is most useful once you already have at least one or two letters in place from the words that cross it. Crosswords are built on overlapping answers, so even a small amount of progress elsewhere in the grid usually hands you a letter or two for the answer you are stuck on. Typing those letters into a pattern, with a wildcard for everything else, turns an open-ended question - what word could this be? - into a much narrower one with a short, reviewable list of genuine candidates.

This is particularly useful for longer answers, where guessing blind is slow, and for less common words you might recognise once you see them but cannot recall unprompted. Many crossword formats share the same underlying logic even though their visual grids differ: American-style grids use fully interlocking words with almost no unused squares, British-style grids tend to use more block symmetry with shorter overlaps, and cryptic crosswords layer a wordplay clue on top of the same letter-pattern logic. Whichever style you are solving, the pattern itself works the same way - known letters in their positions, wildcards everywhere else.

Tips for Narrowing Down Answers

• Fill in every letter you are confident about first - each known letter narrows the results significantly.
• If you get too many results to scan comfortably, try solving one more crossing answer first so you have another letter to add to the pattern.
• Double-check the exact word length required by the crossword grid - an extra or missing wildcard will change which results come back.
• When several results fit the pattern, read the original clue again and rule out any that do not match its meaning.
• A crossword clue's word count in brackets, where shown, tells you how many separate words the answer is split into - a (3,4) clue needs a 3-letter word followed by a 4-letter word, not one 7-letter pattern.
• If your pattern returns an unusually small number of matches, double-check you have not mis-copied a crossing letter - a single wrong letter can rule out the correct answer entirely.

Reading a Crossword Grid

Crossword grids are built from two intersecting sets of answers - normally labelled Across and Down - and every white square belongs to exactly one Across answer and one Down answer at the same time. That overlap is what makes solving possible: a letter you are confident about in a Down answer becomes a known letter in whichever Across answer crosses it, and vice versa. When you solve one answer, it is usually worth immediately checking whether any of its letters feed into an answer you were previously stuck on, rather than moving on and forgetting about it.

Black squares mark where one answer ends and the next begins, and do not count toward word length - only count the white squares the clue number actually spans. If you are working from a printed or on-screen grid and are not sure how many letters an answer needs, counting the actual white squares in that row or column is more reliable than guessing from the clue's phrasing.

Frequently Asked Questions