Find clues or match patterns

Enter a word to see all the clues used for it, or enter a pattern to see all answer words that match that pattern.

Standard matching: Patterns use ? for unknown single letters. For example, P??CH will find both POOCH and PEACH. Use * to mean any number of letters. A*Z finds both ADZ and ALCATRAZ, *CRY gets words that end with CRY, etc. Up to 1000 results are shown from each word list.

This page finds words from Daily, Sunday and Variety puzzles, and also from a dictionary search. See FAQs for dictionary info.

You can use $v to mean a single vowel or $c to mean a consonant. The v and c must be lower case. For consistency with other search engines, Y is always considered to be a consonant. Try these sample links:

$c??$c displays 4-letter answers that start and end with a consonant.

$v$v*$v$v returns words of any length that start and end with two vowels.

Some extensions are available using standard matching. For example, [QJXZ]???[^A-M] finds 5-letter words starting with Q, J, Z, or Z and ending with a letter not in the first half of the alphabet.

New regex matching (advanced): You can now choose to use full regular expression (regex) syntax in your searches. You must explicitly click the RegEx button to perform a regular expression search. Up to 10,000 results from the combined databases (Shortz, Variety, Pre-Shortz, Dictionary) are returned in a single list. Standard matching patterns will not work in regex mode. The syntax is completely different. XWord Info cannot help with regex syntax but the web is full of helpful sites about this. The Regex Dictionary has a particularly good tutorial. The one extension I provide is that $c and $v can be used as shorthand for any consonant and any vowel. Queries can be arbitrarily complex but here are a few simple ones to get you started.