Word-Search

Word Search is a free TCL program that finds words from scrambled letters. It solves Jumble word puzzles and finds words and scores for Scrabble. The program is free, cross-platform, and very fast - the typical search requires less than two seconds.

Word Search has lots of options. It can find words that use all the given letters, and words of shorter length. It can report Scrabble and Word Scrimmage scores for the syndicated newspaper games, and can find two-word combinations.

The program requires a plain-text dictionary file that should be named "words.txt" and be in the script's directory. You can select a different dictionary file by clicking on the Dict button or by selecting the menu File - Load dictionary. The dictionary should have one word per line, but it can have multiple words per line. The file should be sorted, and duplicate words should be removed. The dictionary file "words.txt" is read into memory when the program does the first search. Additional searches use the dictionary already in memory, and are even faster.

Enter the word characters in the "Search letters:" field. Multiple searches can be entered by separating the scrambled words with a space.

As an example, if you wanted to find all the words that could be made with the scrambled letters

      abcelmnrsu

you would type them in to the "Search letters:" field, check the "Find shorter words" Option, then click the "Find" button.

In an eyeblink you'd have all 282 words that use four or more of these letters.

Uncheck the "Find shorter words" Option and click "Find", and you'll immediately know these letters can be rearranged into only one full-length word:

      unscramble

Word Search is written in TCL, an easy-to-use cross-platform scripting language.

If you see the message "Dictionary file -words.txt- not found." in the Solutions output box, you will need to create your own words.txt file, or you can download my English word list.

Version 1.80 of this program includes these changes:

• tested on many operating systems: Red Hat Linux, Fedora Core, Knoppix, Windows 2000, XP, Vista, MacOS Classic, Solaris
• added a partial word search to find words that include the given part
• loads and saves settings between runs
• added language support so the interface can be easily translated to new languages
• improved dictionary read time by a third
• added a toggle to support dictionaries with multiple words per line (though dictionary read is slower)
• can now play wav files instead of the standard beep
• added a debug toggle and console window to the Help menu
• added a benchmark function to the menu, to perform a standard speed test to load the dictionary file and perform two searches
• changed the layout and added pictures to the buttons.

On Unix platforms, you might need to fix the CRLF linefeed characters with:

 dos2unix *.tcl

Make the script executable with:

 chmod 755 *.tcl

[L1 ] Download here (link broken) [L2 ] Download the word list here (link broken) (See [L3 ] for some information, but the downloads won't work)