spelling-bee

A lightweight program for solving the New York Times Spelling Bee.

Usage

Load the spelling.pl predicate file in (SWI-)Prolog. To query word answers to the daily Spelling Bee, use

?- find_words(Center, OuterLetters, Words).

where Center is the central character, OuterLetters is a string of the six surrounding letters.

For pangrams, since the center character is used by definition, find_pangram/2 has the signature

?- find_pangram(Letters, Pangrams).

and will find all accepted pangrams Pangrams using characters in the string Letters.

Example usage

Below is the program run on today's (28th February 2023) characters: A, L, Y, K, R, D, W.

?- find_pangrams("alykrdw", Pangrams).
Pangrams = [awkwardly].

?- find_words(a, "lykrdw", Words).
Words = [alar, alary, alky, alkyd, alkyl, allay, ally, allyl, alway, arak, array, arrayal, aryl, award, away, awkward, awkwardly, awry, dada, daddy, dally, dark, darkly, darky, dawk, draw, drawl, drawly, dray, dryad, drywall, dyad, kaka, kayak, kraal, kyak, kyar, lady, laky, lall, lard, lardy, lark, larky, layaway, lyard, radar, rally, rawly, raya, waddly, waddy, wady, walk, walkaway, walkway, wall, walla, wally, waly, ward, wark, wary, wawl, waylay, wayward, waywardly, yald, yard, yawl].

Specifying a custom dictionary

The word list supplied is sourced from an official word list for Scrabble (see references) and performs well, although it tends to be overly-exhaustive for the Spelling Bee.

If you'd alternatively like to use your own word list, you first need to parse the dictionary to create the predicate word list parsedWords.pl. This is done by running

$ ./process_dictionary.py file

where file is a text file of words delimited by line breaks.

References

• wordgamedictionary.com for the TWL06 Scrabble Word List