Wildcard patterns for crosswords: ?, * and letter sets
How to turn the letters you have into a pattern, what ? and * match, and how letter sets narrow a crossword answer, with counts from the English list.
Published 17 October 2026
Start from the letters you have
Type each known letter where it sits and ? for a gap. "c?t" matches 4 words in the English list: cat, cit, cot, cut.
The pattern fixes the length, so a five-letter crossword light is five characters long. Add a * only when the length is unknown.
Use * for prefixes and suffixes
A * stands for any run of letters, including none. "*ough" finds the 21 English words that end in -ough, from bough and cough to thorough and sourdough.
Two stars work as well: "*ee*" finds every word that contains a double e. Runs of stars collapse into one, so "a***b" means the same as "a*b".
Letter sets
[aeiou] matches one letter from the set and [^aeiou] matches one letter that is not in it. They are useful when you know the shape of a word but not its letters.
"[^aeiouy][^aeiouy]a[^aeiouy][^aeiouy]" describes five-letter words with an a in the middle and consonants around it. The English list has 201 of them, including blast, crack and shalt.
When a clue names a letter
Some clues tell you a letter is in the answer without saying where. Put it in Must include letters. If a clue rules a letter out, put it in Leave out letters. Both filters work on top of the pattern.
Check the answer against the grid
The list is a spell-checker list and will show words a crossword setter would never use, as well as abbreviations such as etc. Use the crossing letters and the clue to choose between the matches.
Combine a pattern with letter filters
A pattern with a * can match words of many lengths. The results are grouped by length, shortest first, so you can read one length at a time instead of scanning a single long list.
Must include and Leave out work on whole words. If a theme clue says the answer contains a k, add k to Must include and the pattern can stay loose.
Common mistakes
Counting the gaps wrongly is the usual one. "c?t" matches three-letter words only; if a clue answer has a hyphen or a space in the grid, remember that the list holds single words with no punctuation, so search for the letters on their own.
A second mistake is using a star where a question mark is needed. A star accepts any number of letters, so "s*e" returns far more than the three-letter words you may be after. Start with question marks when the length is known and loosen the pattern only if nothing fits.