Word Sieve

Word finder · ENABLE1, 172,781 words · rack first, filters after

An online word finder: every word your letters make, then only the ones that fit

Type your letters and the finder lists every word they can spell. Add a run of letters for the words to start with, end with or contain, and only the matching words are kept. The strip prints the count before the filters and the count after them. To hunt seven-letter pangrams with it, see the guide.

Racknone typed Starts withany Containsany Ends withany Rack solves— Pattern keeps— Longest— DictionaryENABLE1 · 172,781 words

Up to 15 characters in the rack; ? is a blank, at most two. The filter boxes take letters only.

The word index is not loaded yet. It ships as 14 plain-text shards, one per word length, totalling 3,203,788 bytes; a rack pulls only the shards it can reach, and the figure for your rack appears here after a search.

What is measured

What is measured. Two things, in order. First, which entries of the word list can be spelled from your letters, each letter used no more times than you typed it. Second, which of those words also start with, contain or end with the run you typed. The second step filters the first step's answer. Rack solves counts the words your letters make and Pattern keeps counts the words left after the filters, so a filter that removes nine tenths of the answer does not look like a thin dictionary.

How it is kept. The list ships as a plain text file, wordlist/enable1.txt. Before publication it is turned into an anagram-key index: each word's letters are sorted, and that sorted key leads to every word spelled with the same letters. The index is split by word length, so a rack pulls only the lengths it can reach, and those shards are fetched after the page loads, which keeps them out of its weight. The filters are substring tests over what the rack produced and need no index of their own, so none of them adds a request.

What it cannot tell you. Whether a word is legal in your game, which depends on a word list this site does not use and cannot ship, or whether it is worth playing on your board. Proper nouns and hyphenated forms are not in the list, and the 4,272 entries of 16 letters or more are outside the index. A filter cannot leave a gap for an unknown letter: each run must appear unbroken.

Questions

What do the three filter boxes do?
They narrow the answer without changing the rack. Starts with keeps the words that begin with those letters, Ends with keeps the ones that finish with them, and Contains keeps the ones that hold them anywhere. Each box takes a run of letters side by side: a Contains of ST means an S followed directly by a T.
Does adding a filter search the dictionary again?
No. The rack is solved first against the indexed dictionary, and the filters then run over that answer in the page, as substring tests. That is why the strip prints two numbers, Rack solves and Pattern keeps, and why tightening a filter fetches nothing.
The rack found words but the filters kept none. Is that broken?
No. The page says which step emptied the list: it gives the number of words the rack built, says that none of them match your filters, and leaves the rack count in the strip. An index that fails to load gets a different message.
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 loads; the rest are 16 letters or longer, which no 15-character rack could build. It 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 page fetches the slices of its index your rack can reach, as plain text from this site, and does every lookup and every filter in your tab. The site's Content-Security-Policy limits connections to its own origin, so your browser blocks any request that would carry your letters somewhere else before it is made.

The rest of the sieve

Want one on paper?

This page finds words on screen. For a puzzle you can print, Ink Friendly makes a word search with an answer key.