Why I developed Crossword Helper

I love solving crosswords – my favourite ones are what you might call ‘British Cryptics’. They are the ones which have a grid where a clue usually has every other letter able to be filled in by answers to other clues (as opposed to an ‘American’ grid where each letter is always part of two answers). With British crossword grids, you are much more likely to end up with partially filled-in clues, where you have around half of the ‘checkers’ from other answers, but can’t get any more of the letters by filling in other clues.

I try not to use electronic aids when completing cryptics, as part of the challenge is to complete a grid using just your own brain. But there are times when I get stuck. For a particular clue, where I have all the letters I can get, I still can’t see what word it could be – and the clue itself is not giving up its meaning either. That’s where Crossword Helper comes in. Before developing the helper, I had been using other crossword solvers, but they all seem quite poorly designed. Either you have to enter question marks for ‘blanks’, or it takes two or three actions to change the word length, or it’s difficult to erase letters once they’ve been inputted. So my site is designed to be really easy to use and to give out suggestions that could be answers to actual crosswords. As a bonus, if you fill in all the boxes (say six of the letters of a six-letter word), then the tool becomes an anagram solver, without you having to leave the page you’re on.

It took quite a while to develop the database of words, as just using so-called ‘dictionary’ words is only a starting point. All sorts of crosswords, but especially British cryptics will have answers that are brand names, or names of famous (usually dead) people, mountain ranges rivers, towns and so on. British Prime Ministers, living and dead, often feature too. I haven’t culled the dictionary word list, as although a lot of the suggested words can be obscure or archaic, there are times when they appear as the answer to clues, especially in the ‘Toughie’ type of cryptics where the setter is pretty much expecting you not to know some of the answers. So the crossword helper displays as many words as it can, and if you’ve not seen a word before, you can always click on it to find out its definition.

There are no rules about whether say a town or river is well-known enough to be included in the list, but after doing crosswords for a while, you get a feeling for what is a piece of general knowledge as opposed to specialist knowledge. So the river Trent is in the database, but the river Anker, which feeds into the Tame, which feeds into the Trent, is not included. Although ‘tame’ would be there as it’s a dictionary word, and in fact ‘Anker’ comes up as a name, as well as a type of cask – such is the richness of the English language!

I add new words pretty much every day, and I’d love you to give me your suggestions if you’ve beaten the crossword helper and it’s not displaying a word (and especially name) that you know exists. I’ll add it to the database, with a definition which is generated by an internet search, which I then usually add to or amend. You can suggest new words, and give feedback on the site in general by using the Contact form.

In the meantime, happy solving!