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Find crossword answers by word length and known letters. Enter a length pattern or apply structural filters to narrow a full dictionary to only the words your grid needs.
Every crossword answer slot has a known length — the number of squares between the black cells bounding that entry. Length alone is a powerful filter: a dictionary of 350,000+ words contains roughly 12,000 five-letter words, but only about 1,800 five-letter words start with R and end with E. Two known letters in a five-letter slot cut the search space by over 85%.
To search by length and position, encode your constraints as a pattern: each confirmed letter occupies its exact position, and ? stands for each unknown square. For a four-letter answer with A at position 1, enter A???. For five letters with E at position 3, enter ??E??.
Additional filters stack on top: ends-with ING on a seven-letter pattern returns only 7-letter words matching the pattern AND ending in -ING. Exclude a letter when crossing entries prove it cannot be in the word. Each stacked constraint reduces the result set multiplicatively, not additively.
These three- and four-letter words appear frequently in crossword grids. Recognizing them by sight speeds up your solving and populates crossing letters faster.
Two-letter crossword slots are heavily constrained — only about 100 two-letter words exist in standard word-game dictionaries. Common ones include AA (rough lava), AB (muscle group), AI (three-toed sloth), EL (elevated rail), EN (half em in typesetting), ER (British exclamation), ET (and, in French contexts), OX (bovine). If you know one letter of a two-letter answer, the other is almost deterministic.
Three-letter slots are the backbone of the crossword grid. A set of about 30 "crossword classic" three-letter words — ERA, ORE, ALE, ETA, IRE, AWE, APE, ACE, AGE, AID, AIR, ARC — appears in a large proportion of daily puzzles because their letter distribution makes them ideal for filling corner crossing positions. Our 3-letter word list covers all of them.
For five-letter and longer answers, the grid almost always provides at least one or two crossing letters by the time you reach the difficult entry. Use the Crossword Pattern Finder for these — pattern mode with crossing letters returns far fewer candidates than a pure length filter.