I'm building some training and am looking for a computer application that will help find words to remember the steps in a process. For each step I have 2-5 choices of letters. So for example, in a 3-step process to make tea, for step 1 I could use "B" (boil water) or "H" (heat water), for step 2 "P" (place tea bag in cup) or "I" (insert tea bag), and for step 3 "F" (fill cup with water) or "P" (pour water into cup). In this example, I'm looking for the computer application to find "HIP" as a word to remember the 3 steps. It's easy to do in your head with 3 letters but can be a monster when it gets to 7 or 8 letters. I've tried crossword and Scrabble dictionaries but they are very cumbersome because they don't find words based on having a choice of letters for each position of a word.

Any help you can provide is greatly appreciated!

Thanks,
Jim

welcome, Jim!

though it's not a computer application, you might try www.onelook.com it can find words for nearly any combination of letters.

I'm very busy right now.

Can you run a perl script?
Do you have the dictionaries available as text files?

Heya, I was going to take some time during lunch today and get a perl app for you, but it occurs to me that I would basically be writing a scaled down version of a utility called "grep" .

You can find a version of it somewhere and if you have a text file containing the words you want to search through, you can get what you want.

For example, suppose your dictionary is called "dict.txt"

Then you might look for matches to your word above using something like:

grep "[bh]i[fp]" dict.txt

Here's the wiki page on grep - there are some tutorials on how to use it at the bottom of the page.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grep

This is a Unix utility, but you can find versions available for Windows.

Here's a GNU library port to windows:
http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/

It contains a lot of other useful utilities.

You just need a word list (dictionary).