Word Sieve

Crossword solver · ENABLE1, 172,781 words · length locked by the pattern

Every word that fits the squares you have

Type the letters you are sure of and an underscore for each square you are not. The number of squares is the number of letters, so the sieve reads every word of that length in a public-domain dictionary and shows the ones that fit. It counts the words it read, and it says so when nothing fits.

Patternnone typed Squares— Known— Blank— Words that fit— Words read— DictionaryENABLE1 · 172,781 words

One character per square: a letter you know, or _ (or .) for one you do not; spaces are ignored. ? marks a blank tile on the rack pages and does not work here.

The word index is not loaded yet. It ships as 14 plain-text shards, one per word length, totalling 3,203,788 bytes. A pattern sets its own length, so exactly one of them is pulled, and the figure for yours appears here after a fit.

What is measured

What is measured. Which words in the list are exactly as long as your pattern and have each letter you typed in the square you typed it. Each blank stands for one square and one letter. The matches come back in alphabetical order with no ranking, and the Words that fit figure in the strip counts all of them.

How it is kept. The list ships as a plain text file, wordlist/enable1.txt. Before publication it is split into an index with one file per word length, keyed by each word's sorted letters. Sorting throws away letter positions, so this page loads the one shard for your pattern's length and checks every word in it. The methodology page describes this scan. It covers the words of a single length out of all 172,781 entries; the strip prints how many words were read, and the line under the results prints the bytes pulled.

What it cannot tell you. Which of the fitting words the setter chose. Proper nouns, phrases and abbreviations are not in the list, and crossword answers are often exactly those.

The pattern sets the word length

A nine-square pattern loads the nine-letter file and nothing else, so the eight- and ten-letter words are never searched. That is why the line under the results names a single shard, and why fitting another pattern of the same length fetches nothing. A pattern of only blanks is allowed and lists every word of that length; the page paints at most 1,500 of them, in alphabetical order, and prints the full total. A pattern longer than the longest indexed word is refused with a message, because no word in the dictionary could fill it.

Questions

What do I type for a square I do not know?
An underscore, or a period if that is easier to reach; both mean any one letter. The pattern's length is the word's length: nine squares match only a nine-letter word, so every blank must hold a letter. A question mark gets an error message, since on the rack pages it means a blank tile you hold.
Can it work out the answer from the clue?
No. This page reads only the shape of the answer: which squares you have filled, and how many are open. There is no clue database and no connection to any crossword. It helps most once a few crossing answers have given you letters.
It fits nothing. Is the solver broken?
Almost certainly not. When no word in ENABLE1 fits, the page says exactly that, names the dictionary and prints how many words of that length it read. It never offers a near miss as an answer. The two usual causes are a wrong crossing letter, which can leave nothing that fits, or an answer that is a proper noun or a phrase, which this list does not hold.
Which dictionary is this, and how many words are in it?
Word Sieve's ENABLE1-derived edition, with 39 entries excluded: a public-domain English word list of 172,781 entries. The 168,509 entries of 2 to 15 letters sit in the index this page reads. The other 4,272 are 16 letters or longer, so no pattern can reach them. The list is served as plain text at /wordlist/enable1.txt, with a provenance note beside it.
Do the letters I type leave my device?
No. The pattern is matched in your tab against one slice of the index, a plain text file fetched after the page loads, and nothing else is requested. The site's Content-Security-Policy limits connections to its own origin, so your browser blocks any request that would carry your squares somewhere else before it is made.

The rest of the sieve