About Word Searcher

Introduction

Use the Word Searcher to find words containing particular strings of letters.

It's a good tool for discovering morphemes. For example, type in a candidate like 'rupt' then see if the words that come up are likely to have it in their word sums and are related to each other by meaning.

For a more involved example, see the example investigation into the words <destruct> and <distract>.

The e-mail from Pete Bowers is part of a fuller PDF 'e-book' on using the Word Searcher as a teacher.

Word Searcher references a copy of the British English inflected word set from the '12dicts' lists compiled by Alan Beale and available at 12dicts-4.0.zip.

There are around 60000 words in the list, including inflected versions, but no abbreviations, hyphenations, names or phrases. The author warns that some Americanisms may have crept in.

The emphasis is on common words, rather than archaic, scientific or jargon words.

All searches ignore case.

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Regular expressions

The search is more powerful than it looks. You can use regular expressions in searches. These are a well-established, if occasionally esoteric, method for specifying quite general search strings.

Examples:

^	matches start of word
^br	matches words beginning with 'br'
[ ]	matches any one of the enclosed class of characters
[w-z]	matches the range of letters starting at w and ending at z, ie. letters w, x, y and z
[aeiouy]	matches any vowel
vo[ck]	matches 'voc' or 'vok'
$	matches end of word
[st]ion$	matches words ending 'sion' or 'tion'
[^ ]	matches any character not in the enclosed class
[^aeiou]	matches any consonant
q[^u]	matches q followed by any letter other than u
\|	separates alternatives
ing\|ed\|er	matches 'ing', 'ed' or 'er'
.	matches any letter
.y.\|^y	matches medial or initial y
( )	groups a pattern
{ }	specifies number of matches for the preceding pattern
m([aeiouy]{2}\|ow)	matches m followed by two vowels or by 'ow'
^.b.ar.$	(for crossword enthusiasts!) matches a 6 letter word of form blank-B-blank-A-R-blank

Do a web search on 'regular expression' or possibly 'Perl' for more information.

The permissible combinations here correspond to the JavaScript set.

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History of Changes

31-Jan-07	Added regular expression table to searcher page.
17-Nov-05	Added link to Pete's e-mail.
2-Dec-04	Added example investigation; and more explicit copyright notices.
8-Oct-04	Added progress message. Bug fixes: ameliorated occasional listing on one line; no longer searches on pressing enter or tabbing out of search pattern field as this caused unwanted searches in some cases.
6-Oct-04	First trial version

The idea came from Pete Bowers who created a searcher for testing hypotheses about how English spelling worked.

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