Crossword Clue Helper
Enter your clue plus what you know about the answer — its length, any known letters, a pattern — and see candidate words. Example: a clue like "capital of France" with pattern p____ narrows to Paris. Results are ranked primarily by pattern; the clue text is used only as a weak ranking signal.
Results are ranked by pattern match. Clue text is used as a weak ranking signal only.
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Type the clue, set the answer length, and optionally a pattern like
p____
for letters you already know. Results show words that match the pattern, ranked primarily
by pattern fit and weakly by which candidates share letters with your clue text.
Each candidate gets a "clue overlap" score — how many of the distinct letters in your
clue appear in the candidate word. It's a weak signal, meant to push candidates that
share letters with the clue a little higher. It doesn't understand the meaning of your clue.
We deliberately kept V1 simple. A proper cryptic solver would need a large clue-answer
corpus plus linguistic analysis, and building that poorly is worse than building it not
at all. The pattern-first approach is reliable at what it does — finding every candidate
that fits your length and known letters.
Leave the pattern empty. The tool will list every word at your target length, with
common words ranked higher. For more advanced letter-pattern matching, try the
Letter Pattern Finder.