Word finder

How it works

Type the letters, pick Contains, Starts with or Ends with, and press Find. Results come shortest first and grouped by length, with your letters highlighted, because in a timed game the short word you can say right now beats the clever one you can't spell.

The list loads the first time you search, then everything runs in your browser. Nothing you type gets sent anywhere.

Which words are in the list?

It's ENABLE, a public domain word list made for word games. It has 172,823 English words with no proper nouns, and it's also part of what Word Bomb uses to check English words when Check words is on.

I hide a short list of slurs and swear words, which leaves 172,592 words to search. ENABLE follows North American spelling, so you'll find color but not colour.

The letter pairs you'll see most

I counted how many words in the list contain each pair of letters. These come up so often that you'll want an answer ready before the round starts:

Three letters are harder. ING is by far the most common, inside 15,217 words, and 12,543 of them end with it. These are the next ones to know:

Tips for word bomb style games

• Keep a few endings ready. ING, ER, ES and ED fit onto almost any verb or noun. If the letters are ED, "red" is faster than thinking of something clever.
• Think of the letters as the middle of a word. For TR, try words that start with them (tree, trip) before you hunt for ones that hide them inside.
• Plurals and verb forms count. In the practice round, cats and cat are different words, and so are jump and jumped.
• Practice the hard ones. Combos like XI or ZZ show up much less often, and they're the ones that catch people out. The Hard setting above uses pairs and triples found in only 250 to 1,200 words.

About the practice round

It's a one player version of Word Bomb's letter combo mode. You get letters, type a word that contains them and press Enter. A good word brings new letters straight away, and the bomb goes off at a random moment between 30 and 60 seconds. When it does, you'll see how many words you found and a few you could have said.

The letters come from the same list. Easy ones appear in at least 5,000 words, medium ones in 1,200 to 5,000, hard ones in 250 to 1,200. Word Bomb's own family friendly blocklist keeps rude combos out.

Play it with friends

Word Bomb is my party game for 2 to 12 people and one phone. Letters show up, you shout a word, tap Pass and hand the phone on before the hidden fuse runs out. There's a category mode with 70 categories, a no words hot potato mode, and an offline dictionary that settles arguments.

Questions

Why isn't a word I know in the list?

ENABLE leaves out proper nouns, abbreviations and most very new words, and it uses North American spelling. A few slurs and swear words are hidden on purpose.

Can I use this for other word bomb games?

Yes. It finds words containing any letters, so it works for any game like that. Their dictionaries might accept a slightly different set of words, though.

How long can my letters be?

Up to 12 letters. Most games use two or three, and that's where the finder is most useful.