Crossinary
Crossinary is a simple dictionary tool for Windows™ to help both creating and solving crosswords and other word puzzles.
It compactly stores a massive (over a quarter of a million words) list of English words (including some proper nouns) and allows you to quickly perform searches to find all the words that match a pattern such as something-A-I-something-E.
Download
You can download Crossinary from here. It’s 4.4MB uncompressed, but most modern browsers will receive a compressed download of 611KB.
It’s a simple program that requires no installation, just copy it somewhere and run it.
If you have problems, or if you are using a download manager, try this link.
You can also download a PGP signature of the executable file.
User Guide
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Run the Crossinary application.
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Type in the word you are looking for. Use * for the letters you don’t have.
Crossinary accepts the letters A-Z, it also treats any number and the characters - and ? as *.
As an example try typing in *AI*E.
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Press the Enter key, or click the button marked List. A list of words matching your pattern should appear.
If you tried the example of *AI*E you will notice that NAIVE is in the list, rather than NAÏVE. This is hardly good English but it does match the fact that most English-language crosswords don’t consider diacritical marks to be significant, and might share a letter between words where one has an accent and the other doesn’t.
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Having a list of possible words is only half the problem solved. Select a word and the
buttons on the right will become activated.
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Press the first button and Crossinary will launch your browser to search for
the word on the OneLook dictionary site,
so that you can find definitions.
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Press the second button and Crossinary will launch your browser to search for
the word on Google for further information
about the word.
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Press the third or fourth buttons and Crossinary will launch your browser to
search for the word on Amazon.com
and Amazon.co.uk respectively
so that you can… Okay, I can’t think of how that could possibly help you either
compose or solve a crossword, I just stuck it in because if you were to buy something from that search
I’d get a few cents to go towards hosting this site.
License
This software is provided “AS IS” without any guarantee of anything at all.
The
software is released into the public domain. You may freely copy and/or distribute it. You can print out a hex dump onto rice paper and eat it for all I care ☺
Jon Hanna
