The motivation for the development of these apps was the New York Times online game 'Spelling Bee'. In that game, a player (or just ordinary nice guy) is presented with a set of seven letters ('cleverly' arranged to resemble a cell in bee hive) and is asked to form words from these letters which (1) must contain the letter at the cell's center, (2) contain at least four letters, and (3) not be proper nouns or hyphenated words. If you have played this game at all, you will likely have discovered that some perfectly good words are excluded (e.g. 'atlatl', 'coon', 'luff') whilst other very suspect words are allowed (e.g. 'dunno','wanna'). Once I created an app to suggest words solving the Spelling Bee game, I thought I might just as well add apps to answer other 'word selection' purposes.
The lists of possible acceptable words which I've used to generate the suggested 'solution words' for these apps is a winnowed version of a list of English words that I grabbed at GitHub. For the Spelling Bee app, for instance, I've removed words of length less than four as well as capitalized or hyphenated words. As a caution, note that bizarrely acceptable words in the NYT game (e.g. 'dunno') will not necessarily arise. As I discover these strange forms ad hoc, I will try to remember to add them to the list of possible words. Likewise genuine words which for unknown (but perhaps surmizable) reasons are excluded, I'll add to the 'verboten' list as I come across them. If you wish to contribute to this process of curation, email me at 'rcgayle@protonmail.com'. I've done something similar to create a starting list for the other search apps under the tabs 'Word Search 1' and 'Word Search 2'.
Finally, if you have R and R Studio installed, I can send you the shiny files so that you can run this locally on your machine which will spare you the necessity of having an internet connection. Just e-mail me. Thanks for stopping by.
Click first on the required letter, then on the remaining six allowed letters. The required letter appears in magenta, the others in green. Once all seven have been selected, click 'Save/Create Word Lists'. This version is much faster (10^4 times, at least) than an earlier version but it still might take a second or two for the list of suggested words to appear.
These are the known words which contain the required letter and only the allowed letters, are of length at least four, and might be accepted by the NYT's resident numbskull.
These are the known words which contain the required letter and only the allowed letters, are of length at least four, and are NOT accepted by the NYT's resident numbskull.
Use this application to find all words which contain only letters from a specified set of letters and satisfy user-selected length restrictions. If you wish no length restrictions, set mimimum to '1' and maximum to '24'. To select words of a single specific length, set both maximum and minimum to that value. Take care that the value selected for minimum word length is no greater than that selected for maximum word length, otherwise the list produced will be empty. Select permissible letters in the next panel.
Select Minimum and Maximum Word Length
Click to select permissible letters.
These are the words found which contain only the permissible letters and satisfy the length restrictions.
Use this application to find words which must contain all letters from a specified set of letters, may contain others as well, and also satisfy user-selected length restrictions. Length restrictions are recommended particularly if the number of required letters is small since, without length restriction, the resulting list of words will likely be very, very long. However, if you wish no length restrictions, set mimimum to '1' and maximum to '24'. To select words of a single specific length, set both maximum and minimum to that value. Take care that the value selected for minimum word length is no greater than that selected for maximum word length, otherwise the list produced will be empty. Select required letters in the next panel.
Select Minimum and Maximum Word Length
Click to select required letters. Obviously the minimum word length in the list produced will be at least as great as the length of the list of required letters.
These are the words found which contain all the required letters and satisfy the length restrictions.