Free on-line dictionary with wildcard function

March 8, 2005 2:33 PM

I'm looking for a free, on-line dictionary that will let me do wildcard searches. For example, when looking up *ton* I want to come up with atone, acetone and cretonne as well as ton and tone.
posted by Cuke to writing & language (9 comments total)

This gets two out of your three, any good?
posted by aisforal at 2:48 PM on March 8, 2005

I don't know whether something on the web that does this. But it's easy to find a copy of the linux.words file (/usr/share/dict/words) and search through it. It has 3794 words that have "ton" in them somewhere.
posted by grouse at 2:54 PM on March 8, 2005

Try the very useful dict.org. Apart from the web interface it also supports clients with the dict protocol, for which there's amongst others the useful commandline client. Regex and soundex searches supported, and the databases are freely redistributable and modifiable.
posted by fvw at 3:13 PM on March 8, 2005

Scrabble Dictionary Tool: Use the WordFinder field and you get tons of words with any string (including all those you listed), and their respective point values. :)
posted by heatherann at 3:52 PM on March 8, 2005

err... Word Pattern pattern field, not WordFinder.
posted by heatherann at 3:52 PM on March 8, 2005

I use Onelook for wildcard dictionary searches.
posted by frenetic at 6:06 PM on March 8, 2005

Merriam-Webster Online found 2517 entries for "*ton*". Their thesaurus is very limited but the dictionary's excellent for wildcard searches; helped me win a friendly wager regarding who could find the word with the highest number of letters in alphabetical sequence ("understudy," with its r-s-t-u, was victorious.)
posted by cirocco at 8:32 AM on March 9, 2005

I highly recommend yourDictionary.com for all your word lookup needs, including wildcard lookups.
posted by Man O' Straw at 10:50 AM on March 9, 2005

Thank you for all of these excellent suggestions. While dict.org seemed to be the best for the search I had in mind, I really liked the features on some of the other sites. For example, having quick French/English translation on the front page of yourDictionary.com is helpful.
posted by Cuke at 6:54 AM on March 12, 2005