Puzzle Tools
Here are some tools that I used when solving or making puzzles that I have found to be particularly useful
- The best all around tool with a regex-like ability to search for words and phrases with missing letters, options for letters, and anagrams. It’s use of Wikipedia to search is its best feature, as it finds multi-word phrases that no dictionary would have, but also its biggest annoyance, as it’s excellent at finding multiple words that are found consecutively, but are not a phrase on its own, like “puppies that”
- A dictionary search generally less featureful than nutrimatic, as it can only search for missing letters and missing vowels/consonants, but uses many dictionaries and you can sort by commonness (# of dictionaries it appears in). It’s unique power-feature, though, is the ability to add a short definition for the word, which makes it great for crossword clues and similar when it manages to work.
https://www.quinapalus.com/qat.html
- Qat is the most featureful for looking for single words, as it allows you to specify multiple expressions that must be words. It’s got a learning curve, but it’s ideal for problems like “find words that you can insert a ‘p’ in to get a new word”. I find that it’s my main tool for writing puzzles, but it’s also got times during solving where you want it over anything else
https://puzzle-manta.com/tools/yarns/search
- YARNS is a little opaque, but in general it’s most similar to nutrimatic but with more abilities related around anagrams, and uses a corpus.
- Qhex’s Word Play tool is the best quick and dirty option for adding/removing letters to a string to get words, as well as transadding and transdeleting (anagramming while adding or deleting n letters). Sometimes its dictionary is questionable but this has served as a boon for many specific word puzzles. It also has other tools besides Word Play that I haven’t used, but I’m sure are good
https://www.wordplays.com/crossword-solver/
- My go-to crossword clue search. It has a large archive of crossword clues from established sources (NYT, etc.) as well as cryptic clues, though those aren’t normally useful. You can search a pattern if you know the length of the word. This is best for crossword-ese clues that you don’t want to just have to know
- The reverse image search I always use, and only for its ability to paste an image from my clipboard into it, which Google Images lacks. Most of the time, I then right-click and “Search Google for this image” (from Chrome) on the results, or even the original picture if nothing comes up, but it’s worth it to not have to save the image for those that I have to snip from