Application Features

This page enumerates ideas and proposals for features.

Crossword/definition viewer

Since we will have a lot of data on the server, we will start by building a viewer for crosswords and word definitions. Also, the user should be able to play and check the solution.

Word lookup (main feature)

Let the user give keywords, hints, partial definitions, synonyms, antonym... and provide word proposals. Also, the user is able to add constraints on the word, like length, known letters, known word splits (if the solution is a compound word)...

While the webpage will show a limited amount of these result, sorted by pertinence, we could also provide some API. For instance, returning results in JSON format.

Crossword builder

Like some existing tools (for instance the Crossword Compiler), we could have an interactive builder for crosswords. The user could place word and select definitions. The UI would propose completion to ease the construction.

Crossword generation

Using some user-defined parameters (size, theme, difficulty...), generate a crossword. We could also reuse some data-mined crosswords (and provide the URL to the original website, of course).

Theme and difficulty could be defined using clustering results, or at least number of occurrences (rare words tend to be more difficult).

We could also generate more exotice crosswords. Sometimes they are very sparses. Or even generate something like a 3D crossword.

Crossword solver

We could also provide tool to solve more than one word at once. If we let the user specify more than one definition and specify how these words are placed on the crossword, our solver could take advantage of intersections to find better candidates.

If this idea is extended to its limits, we could allow the user to specify the whole crossword and solve it. Of course, the difficulty of such tool is to provide a user-friendly interface...