Scrabble Solver | Pattern Matching Tutorial

2 & 3-letter words
US/Canada (TWL)	2,3.
English (SOWPODS)	2,3.
French (OSD4)	2,3.

Pattern Matching Tutorial

The Pattern Matching field can be a bit confusing when you first come to it and explaining all the ins and outs of it, along with some decent examples, in the limited space we have for each field's helptext just is not feasible. So we have dedicated an entire page to explaining how it works. But first here is a quick reference table...

Character/Letter	Effect
(blank)	Will attempt to use zero or more letters from the search string (the rack).
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z	Will use this letter in the place specified & will not draw on the search string (ie. if you specify the letter O in both the search string and the pattern match then you could end up with results that have 2 o's (ie 'doors' if using the pattern O with the search string OSRDW).
? _ .	Indicates a character that must be replaced by a letter from the search string (the rack).
$	Indicates the start or the end of a word. Must only appear at the start or the end of the pattern string.

Pattern Matching is a way of limiting your results.

Often when you search with a lot of letters or if you have a couple of blank tiles (wildcards) there will be quite a lot of results returned - sometimes so many that the result list is truncated. The thought of looking through 300 5 letter words for the perfect one is just a big yawn - what if your Scrabble opponent just put an X on the board that you'd like to use? What if your Scrabble opponent has made available the Triple-Word-Score square just two spaces to the right of the letter K? What if you just want words that have the letter T as the 2nd letter? What if your opponent just played the word 'GRAPHICAL' just 6 spaces to the right of a TripleWordScore and you have the tiles OOOEGZ?

Using a pattern will remove unwanted words and only return relavant results! Lets start with the first example - your opponent has put an X on the board and you would like to use it to form your next word. Set the pattern to be X and only words that include the letter X will be returned. Notice how the letters from your anagram string are fitted around the letter X - if you use the default anagram string (OSRDW) with the English (SOWPODS) dictionary you will get 3 results back: SOX, WOX, and OX.

Examples of the wildcard (?) and word start/end ($) characters.

Ok, that was an easy one. Lets take it up another level! What if your Scrabble opponent has made available the Triple-Word-Score square just two spaces to the right of the letter K? If you set the pattern to K?? then only words that have at least 2 letters to the right of the K will be returned. ? is called a wildcard - it represents a letter in the result word that must exist and be taken from the search string (note that you can also use an underscore '_' or a full-stop/dot/period '.' to represent a wildcard instead). So with the default search string (OSRDW) with the English (SOWPODS) dictionary the pattern K?? will return KOR, KOS, KOW (2 letters after the K), but also KOWS, and KORS (3 letters after the K). Just like the previous example pattern, X, if you don't specify further constraints then Scrabble Solver will put as many letters around the pattern that it can - its a bit like saying to Scrabble Solver "the result word must contain at least K?? but can contain more if you can find them!".

But what if the Triple-Word-Score square is in the corner and we only want result words that have precisely 2 letters after the K - how do we do that? Simple! We tell Scrabble Solver where the end of the word is, and we do that with the $ character. $ denotes the start or the end of the word - try to use it somewhere else and you'll get an error. So for our example you should set the pattern to be K??$ and that will return KOR, KOS & KOW but not KOWS or KORS. In fact if you set the search string (your rack) to OSRDW? then you'll find that Scrabble Solver will return WORKED too! If however you only want 2 letters before the K and 2 letters afterwards then set the pattern to $??K??$ which will return ROKES and ROKED but not WORKED.

Some more examples.

Of course, you can specify as many letters as you wish: $??KE?$ is valid, or $?R?KE? is valid, etc..!

Perhaps you just want words beginning with the letter T: $T is the pattern for that!

Perhaps you just want at least 4-letter words beginning with the letter T: $T??? is the pattern for that!

Perhaps you just want exactly 4-letter words beginning with the letter T: $T???$ is the pattern for that!

Just want words ending with the letter T: T$ is the pattern... you get the idea I hope.

And finally...

So, finally, what if your opponent did just play the word 'GRAPHICAL' just 6 spaces to the right of a Triple-Word-Score and you have the tiles OOOEGZ? Then your pattern is 'GRAPHICAL' and the longest result should be ZOOGEOGRAPHICAL (the last word in the dictionary!). This shows that pattern matching can be used to expand a current word on the board - often much shorter words of course - but they can be good scoring opportunities too. This particular example is hardly likely, but we can all dream!

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(c)2007+ Matt Parkins

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