About Letter Pattern

Letter Pattern is an English word pattern finder for people solving word puzzles. You set the letters you know in their positions, the letters a word must contain and the letters to leave out, and it lists the matching words. Filtering happens in your browser. On the main finder, your settings are also kept in the page URL so a search can be bookmarked or shared; loading or sharing that URL sends those query parameters to the site's hosting provider. See Privacy for details.

Where the words come from

The finder searches 152,309 words of 3 to 12 letters from the public-domain ENABLE word list (8,636 of them have five letters). ENABLE was compiled around 2000, so some newer words are missing, and it is not the official dictionary of any game. A word being listed here does not mean Wordle, Scrabble, Words With Friends or any other game will accept it.

What the labels mean

• Common words: words that also appear in SCOWL at size 50 or below, a commonly used size for everyday spelling dictionaries. This is a classification by list size, not a measure of how often a word is used today.
• Less common words: in ENABLE but not in SCOWL size 50.
• Plurals and verb forms: words the AGID inflection database lists as a plural or verb form of another word (for example “cards”, “baked”) and that are not base words themselves. “Breed”, “greed”, “tweed” and “chaos” are base words, so they stay in the common base words.
• High-coverage words: a simple score that favours words whose letters appear in many other matches. It is not a complete solving strategy.

Offensive words

Words flagged by SCOWL's offensive and profane lists or by the LDNOOBW list, including plurals and verb forms of those words, are hidden by default (50 five-letter words). These lists are broad, so a few words with harmless meanings (for example “butts” or “craps”) are hidden too. Tick “Show offensive words” in the finder to include them; nothing is removed from the underlying data.

Who runs this site

Letter Pattern is an independent project. It is not affiliated with The New York Times, Hasbro, Mattel or Zynga. See Credits for sources and licences and Contact to reach us.