Okay, so today I wanted to mess around with something a little different – crossword puzzles, but with a twist. I had this idea: could I make something that predicts possible words for a crossword, given some clues and the letters you’ve already filled in? Sounds kinda neat, right?
Getting Started
First things first, I needed a word list. I just grabbed a simple text file online, you know, the kind that’s just a giant list of words, one per line. Nothing fancy, just a basic dictionary.
Next, I figured I’d use Python because, well, it’s my go-to for quick projects. I started by loading that word list into, well, a list in Python. Easy peasy.
The Main Idea
The core of it is pretty simple. You give it a pattern, like “C_O_D”, where the underscores are blank spaces. Then, you tell it the length of the word you’re looking for (in this case, 5 letters). The program’s job is to sift through that giant word list and find all the words that match that pattern.
Building It Out
I wrote a function, let’s call it ‘predict_word’. It takes two things: the pattern and the word length. Inside, it loops through every single word in my word list.
- Check the Length: First, it checks if the word from the list is even the right length. If it’s not, we just skip it. No point wasting time.
- Compare the Pattern: If the length is good, we go through the pattern, letter by letter. If the pattern has a letter, we check if the word has the same letter in that spot. If the pattern has an underscore, we just move on – that’s a wildcard, anything goes there.
- Keep the Matches: If a word makes it all the way through the pattern check without any problems, that means it’s a match! We add it to a separate list of ‘possible words’.
Trying It Out
So, I ran it with a few tests. For “C_O_D” and a length of 5, I got back “CLOUD”, And “COULD”. Cool! For a longer one like “A_P_A_I_E”, length 9, it found some and I can guess it correctly. I also added upper and lower case formats. Pretty good.
Making It Better
Right now, it’s pretty basic. A few things I thought about to make it better:
- Bigger Dictionary: My word list is kinda small. A bigger, better dictionary would give way more options.
- Maybe adding hints next time.
Overall, it was a fun little project. It’s not perfect, but it does what I wanted – gives me some ideas for those tricky crossword spots. And it’s something I can keep tweaking and improving. Might even turn it into a little web app someday. Who knows?
