Finding Words for Crossword Puzzles

Video Transcript

"Now in my case, I have developed my own software for writing crossword puzzles. For those who don't have access to this, what do you do? Well, it's, you do what I did when I first started writing crossword puzzles back in 1979. I had books, word lists, there was a Scrabble players word list, which just had all the words, that would, were legal in Scrabble, sorted by length of word. So, if I need to get a 6-letter word, I would turn to that page in the book, and find one that would fit with what I had in the grid. Shortly afterwards, I came across another really useful book, called the Funk-Wagnall?s Crossword Puzzle Word Finder, in which, it listed up to 6-letter words, with any combination of two letters. So, if you had a 6-letter word that began with A, it had C in the fourth spot, you could go through the 6-letter words and find the section that had words that would fit into that. Nowadays, I do it on the computer, but if you don't have that, there are books available. Some people who compose crossword puzzles, have what I find an uncanny ability, to come up with words that will fit in to a position in the grid. That's something I never did, and it was always much harder work for me. They would look at it and say, OK, I've got A, three letters, a C, and then two letters. Whereas, I'm lazy, I use a computer, and it brings up, I just tell it what letters are in the word, the number of letters in the word, and it gives me the list."