Online Crossword Help

You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

Martha, one of the ways in which you can beat people on online word games is to cheat.

You’re telling me?

Yeah, I just want to say that, you know, if you want to be really good at playing Scrabble online or any kind of word search or even doing crossword puzzles.

Now, why would I want to cheat?

Well, okay, let’s not say cheat. How about help yourself along?

Okay.

With some digital tools, and I’ve got a couple of them for you.

And sometimes if you’re just playing against yourself, it’s okay.

Okay.

Performance enhancing digital tools.

Right, right.

Let me have it.

So the PEDT that we’re using today, one of them is called wordnavigator.com.

And what this site allows you to do is to do what’s called wild carding.

So let’s say that I have a crossword puzzle and I’ve got two blank squares in the middle of it.

And I can’t quite make out what the word is.

I can go into Word Navigator, put question marks where those two blanks are and put all the other letters that I do know.

And it will come up with all the words that match putting any character where the question mark is.

Does that make sense?

-huh, sure.

It comes with every possible word in English.

They have an immense dictionary, I guess, and it’s great.

It’s brilliant.

And so you can fill in that square and kind of move along if you’re stuck.

This is particularly useful for crossword puzzles, but it can also be used for Scrabble.

Because you can go to the A Word A Day anagram server, for example,

Put all of your tiles for Scrabble into their anagram server,

And it will come up with all the possible words that you can make.

Yo!

Yeah, yeah, that’s kind of cool.

And there are other sites that do anagrams that will also tell you the ones with the highest Scrabble score,

Although they’re not perfect.

And, of course, if you’re playing competitively online, you know,

Yeah, maybe you don’t want to cheat because it kind of takes the fun out of it.

So, in any case, these are the tools that you can use to help you along when you’re doing puzzles and quizzes and crosswords online.

We’ll link to these on the website, wordnavigator.com,

The A Word Today Anagram server, and a couple of others,

Just to help you along for your puzzle solving.

And in the meantime, if you’re puzzling over a word, give us a call, 1-877-929-9673,

Or you can send an email to words@waywordradio.org.