Okay, so today I wanted to mess around with generating crossword puzzle suggestions. You know, like when you’re stuck on a clue and need a little nudge? I figured it couldn’t be that hard, right? Famous last words.
The Initial Idea
My first thought was, “I’ll just grab a dictionary and start filtering!” I mean, how many words could there possibly be? (Spoiler: a LOT). I envisioned this super simple process:
- Get the clue.
- Get the length of the word I needed.
- Find all words in the dictionary that match the length.
- Done! Brilliant!
Yeah, that didn’t quite work out.
Hitting the First Wall (of Words)
First off, finding a good, clean dictionary file was a bit of a pain. I ended up finding some text file online after a bit of digging, and it was HUGE. Like, seriously huge. Loading the whole thing into memory was… not ideal. My poor little laptop started to sound like a jet engine.
Okay, so loading the whole thing at once was a no-go. I switched to reading it line by line, which was better, but still slow. I was basically iterating through every single word in the dictionary for every single clue. Not exactly efficient.
Trying to be Clever (and Failing)
Then I thought, “Aha! I’ll use some clever data structures!” I started messing around, planning to create a giant nested dictionary structure, where the first level was word length, and the next level was… well, I hadn’t figured that out yet. It got messy, fast. My code started to look like a tangled ball of yarn, and I was pretty sure I was making things worse.
Partial Letters to the Rescue? (Maybe?)
Then I realized, I wasn’t even considering the partially filled-in letters! You know, like when you have “A _ _ L E” and you need a five-letter word starting with “A” and ending with “E”. My initial “just check the length” approach was completely useless for that.
Back to the drawing board. I figured I needed a way to filter words based on not just length, but also the known letters. I started playing around with, and that actually seemed to help. I could now at least narrow down the possibilities based on the letters I knew.
I changed a way for * example,I can try “A _ _ L E” like this:
A[a-z][a-z]LE
Still a Long Way to Go
So, where am I now? Well, I have something that kind of works. It can take a clue, a word length, and some known letters, and spit out a list of possible words. It’s still pretty slow, and it definitely doesn’t handle anything fancy (like synonyms or wordplay, which are super common in crosswords).
But hey, it’s a start! I learned a lot about string manipulation, and the importance of not trying to load a giant dictionary into memory all at once. Maybe I’ll revisit this project someday and try to make it actually good. For now, I’m just happy I didn’t completely melt my laptop.
