Guide

The Word Sword searches big word lists in the ways puzzle hunters need: by pattern, by anagram, by letterbank, through a thesaurus, and it cracks substitution cryptograms. Long searches show their progress as they run, and you can cancel them at any time. Every search has its own address, so you can bookmark or share it.

Patterns (regular expressions)

Each entry in the word list is tested against your regular expression; entries that contain a match are listed. Searches ignore case unless you tick Case-sensitive, and stop at 5,000 results.

Put several patterns on separate lines and only entries matching all of them are returned.

Anagrams

Use all letters — including missing ones

Finds words that use every letter you give, exactly once. Add one ? for each letter you don't know yet: aelpp?? finds every 7-letter word containing A, E, L, P and P plus two other letters.

Use some letters

Words made from a subset of your letters (each used at most once), optionally limited by length. ? works as a blank tile here too.

Several words

Phrases that use exactly your letters, like the old multiword anagram tool. Set the maximum number of words, a word that must appear, word-length limits, whether a word may repeat, or just list the words that fit. Results can be sorted by how common their words are. Smaller dictionaries (Moby single words, Scrabble) give the most useful phrases; enormous lists produce a flood of junk.

Cryptograms

Solves simple substitution ciphers (each letter consistently replaced by another), the way quipqiup does. With Spaces mark word breaks on, it fits real English words to the cipher words — most constrained first, preferring common words, and tolerating a few unknown words such as names. Without word breaks it searches keys by letter statistics (four-letter sequences) and then splits the result into words. The best few solutions update live while it works.

If you already know some letters, enter them as cipher=plain: VQ=AT means V is A and Q is T.

Letterbanks

Letterbanks are like several interleaved anagrams with wildcards. Define banks of letters, then build a pattern where /1 means “one letter from bank 1”, /2 “one letter from bank 2”, and so on. Each letter in a bank can be used once; a . in a bank is a wildcard. Parts of the pattern in parentheses are ordinary regular expressions.

Example: the answer has 9 letters; the first is C, the next three come from aactmgh, and the last five are L, Y, S, S plus one unknown. Banks /1 = aactmgh and /2 = lyss., pattern (c)/1/1/1/2/2/2/2/2 → catalyses, catalysis, catalysts.

Thesaurus

Looks up every thesaurus entry that contains your word (Moby thesaurus) and lists the related words, optionally filtered by a regular expression: happy filtered by ^.{5}$ gives the 5-letter synonyms.

Word lists

Most lists have one word or phrase per line. A few have their own format, which matters when you write patterns:

The enormous lists take a second or two for simple patterns; complex look-ahead patterns can take longer — that's what the progress bar is for.

Your own lists

Use Add your own list… under the word list menu to upload a text file (or paste text). Choose A text → its unique words to turn any document — a novel, a puzzle's flavor text, a transcript — into a list of its distinct words, or A word list to use your file one entry per line. Your lists appear at the top of the menu in this browser, work with every tool except the cryptogram solver, and can be shared with a link. Nobody can see them without that link. Lists that haven't been used for six months are removed.