I’ve just put live one of the biggest upgrades to the site since I launched it 4 years ago!

There are four main improvements:

1. We now show results for “lateral play” – that’s when you play a new word alongside an existing word, forming lots of 2 letter words in the process.  This can be a way to make serious points in a game!  I’m very excited about this feature as I’ve wanted to do it for a long time, but it’s pretty hard.  Most Scrabble Solver sites don’t even try!
2. You can now put ‘wildcards’ in the ‘Existing word’ box.  So if you had two existing words on the board, and wanted to play a word that crossed both of them, you can enter letters from each, with ? for each empty space between them.  For example, perhaps you want to include the G from one word, and the T from another, and there are two empty squares between them, you’d enter G??T.  Scrabble Helper might suggest GIFT or YOGURT or GRATIFY.
3. I’ve put some pop-up help pages throughout the site to make it easier to work out how to use all the features.  Just click ‘show help’ next to each item.
4. I’ve added two new dictionaries:
   (a) the new International 2012 dictionary which came into effect on 1 January this year (also known as CSTCWL/CSW/SOWPODS 2012).  Most online games and apps are still using the 2007 version, but the new version is there ready for you once they update
   (b) a generic dictionary which contains only words that are present across all Scrabble dictionaries. This means any words we suggest are likely to be accepted by most games, but we might not always suggest the best words.  However if you find your word game is using an obscure dictionary you might find the generic dictionary matches it better than the others.

I’ve also fixed a couple of bugs:

1. An annoying bug that tripped up many people – if you accidentally typed a space into one of the boxes, we didn’t return any results.  Now we do 🙂
2. When the list of results is sorted by score, the words with the same score were shown in reverse alphabetical order.  They’re now in correct alphabetical order 🙂

I hope you find the upgrades useful.  As it’s such a big change there is a possibility of teething troubles.  Let me know if there are any problems and I’ll sort them out.

Of course, if you have the Word Finder for Scrabble iPhone app, I’m sure you’ll be wondering if these features will make it to the app.  Well the answer is yes!  All these new features will be in the next update 🙂