Words Worth - Crossword and Scrabble Companion ---------------------------------------------- Copyright (C) Moose O'Malley, September 2007. +===========================================================+ | T A B L E O F C O N T E N T S | +===========================================================+ | * Introduction | * Using this Program | * Adding Words to the List of Known Words Options | * Uninstalling this Program | * Why I Wrote this Program | * Words List Data File | * Special Thanks to | * The Future | * Reviews / Awards / CDs | * Freeware Information | * Warranty | * Amendment History | * Contacting the Program's Author +===========================================================+ Introduction : -------------- Words Worth - Crossword and Scrabble Companion for Windows 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP, etc. This program is free software. Anyone - any person, any company, or any business - can use this program for free. No fees or payment is required. See "Freeware Information" below. Words Worth - Crossword and Scrabble Companion provides some very useful functionality and is especially suited to people who like playing scrabble, or doing crosswords, or using anyone who needs to look up words or use words in other ways. Words Worth - Crossword and Scrabble Companion features include : - A Sample list of only 938 words. You cna use any word lists you like - including lists of up to 263,535 words (that are available on my web site). (Due to file size restrictions on my WEB site, this list of words needs to be downloaded separately - see my WEB page for details). - Ability to do wild card searches : you can use ? (question mark) to represent a single letter, or * (asterisk) to represent one or more letters. Example #1: a??i? will find all 5 letter words starting with 'a' and having a 4th letter of 'i'. e.g. acrid. Example #2: ac*al will find all words starting with 'ac' and ending in 'al'. e.g. accidental. Example #3: ac* will find all words starting with 'ac'. Example #4: *dent will find all words starting with 'dent'. Example #5: ?? find all two letter words. - Ability to do letter / template / anagram searches : 1. Search for words containing at least 1 of each of these letters and any other letters. 2. Search for words containing only these letters and at least 1 of each letter. 3. Search for words containing only these letters and only the specified number of each letter. - Ability to do Phonetic Searches, so you can now search for all words that sound more or less like another word. - You can limit the words returned by these searches to a certain range of lengths. e.g. only return words between 5 and 10 characters long. - Word List Maintenance : 1. Ability to erase the included word list and build your own words lists. 2. Ability to type in new words and add them to the list. 3. Ability to paste in a document of new words and add them to the list. 4. Ability to load a text document file of new words and add them to the list. 5. Ability to Add words to the list of known words. 6. You also choose whether to ignore words that contain numbers, ignore numbers, and strip out all non-alphabetic characters) when scanning the temporary work area for words. (See "Adding Words to the List of Known Words Options" below). And, you can do all of this at the click of a mouse button, within a nice easy to use graphical interface. Developed using 32-bit Delphi. Words Worth - Crossword and Scrabble Companion will **NOT** run under Windows 3.x (even with Win32 installed) !! Using this Program : -------------------- To use this program, unzip the contents of the ZIP file to a directory - such as c:\words_worth - and run the executable file words_worth.EXE. See the introduction above for the type of searches and functionality available in the program. Adding Words to the List of Known Words Options : ------------------------------------------------- Everything is lowercase. In Words Worth - Crossword and Scrabble Companion, all words are treated as lowercase words. So the words Mike, mike, mIKE, MIKE, mIKe would all be treated as and equivalent to mike. When adding words to the List of Known Words, you can choose whether to : - ignore words that contain numbers (such as Area51), and, - ignore numbers (213), and, - strip out all punctuation (@, #, $, %, etc) when scanning the temporary work area for words. So, the phrase : Chelsea are the "best" $$football$$ team !! would be treated like : Chelsea are the best football team If this option was unchecked (so punctuation, etc was not stripped out, then "best" would be treated as a new word, as would $$football$$ and !! It is recommended you leave these options checked (i.e. activated) to prevent pollution of your word lists. As with all buttons / functions that change the word lists, you will be prompted to confirm adding of words before the program proceeds to add words. Uninstalling this Program : --------------------------- At the present time, there is No Uninstall function. If you ever want to delete Words Worth - Crossword and Scrabble Companion from your computer, then : 1. Exit the program, and delete it from wherever you installed it on your harddrive. Simple as that ! Why I Wrote this Program : -------------------------- I love a good game of scrabble, and have done for as long as I can remember. I also enjoy crosswords. But, nothing is more frustrating than not being able to find the elusive word you need. This program was written to help me (and you !) find the words we need. I originally wrote a program of the same name "Words Worth - Crossword and Scrabble Companion" way back in 1982 for my Apple ][ computer. This old Apple ][ program did part of what this new version does, but it was limited in functionality and severely limited in the number of words it could handle. Back then, there was no internet - or at least the internet was not publicly accessible - so no lists of words were publicly available - that I could find anyway - so I had to type in words by hand. This was painful to say the least, but I persevered and the program eventually contained around 850 or so words - but that was about the limit that the Apple ][ could handle, well it was in AppleSoft BASIC anyway. I gave the program away to friends and they distributed it to their friends. But, this was all long ago now. Anyway, a few weeks ago, I played scrabble, and I started thinking about my old Apple ][ program again, and I decided to tackle a user friendly version for Windows. I originally wrote this program to pull words and generate its word list from my own documents - and enable the user to do the same. But, this was a little tedious, and it was amazing to see how many documents you need to scan to get a few thousand unique words. Also, my documents contained words - like program variable names, computer terms, etc - that I did not necessarily want to appear in the word list. Anyway, just when I was finishing the program I thought I'd do a search on the internet for word lists. Within a few hours, I had downloaded a few big word lists, and eventually settled on the YAWL list (see "Words List Data File" below) which is now included with this program, and is especially suited for scrabble and crossword players. So, not only is my original program resurrected, but it is also infinitely bigger, better, and easier to use than ever. The basic list of 938 words (the default list used by this program) was extracted from the disk of my original Apple ][ version of Words Worth - Crossword and Scrabble Companion - a program that I wrote way back in 1982. So, the data file spans generations of computers, generations of operating systems, and more than 20 years of time. Pretty cool hey ! See my web page for screen shots and a disk image of this Apple ][ version of Words Worth - Crossword and Scrabble Companion - which you can download and run and use with Apple 2 emulators right on your own PC ! I hope you enjoy the program. Words List Data File : ---------------------- This Words Worth - Crossword and Scrabble Companion uses a list of words called Yet Another Word List (YAWL), which is a list of 263,533 words especially developed for use by Scrabble and Crossword players. This list of words was built (mainly from other Public Domain lists) by Mendel Cooper, Alan Beale, and others. This list is made available under the following license : The YAWL list, is in the Public Domain. There are no restrictions on its use or distribution. and can be downloaded directly from : http://personal.riverusers.com/~thegrendel/software.html http://chrisheng.hypermart.net/ http://thor.prohosting.com/~cslheng/ So far, I have added 2 additional words to this list : A and I, making 263,535 words. This list of 263,535 words is included with this Words Worth - Crossword and Scrabble Companion. Of course, I do not claim any rights over this word list. As such, it is distributed in unprotected, plain text form. The word list is included completely free of charge with this program. This basic list of 938 words was extracted from the disk of my original Apple ][ version of Words Worth - Crossword and Scrabble Companion - a program that I wrote way back in 1982. So, the data file spans generations of computers, generations of operating systems, and more than 20 years of time. Pretty cool hey ! See my web page for screen shots and a disk image of this Apple ][ version of Words Worth - Crossword and Scrabble Companion - which you can download and run and use with Apple 2 emulators right on your own PC ! Special Thanks to : ------------------- Thanks to the authors of YAWL and other word lists - see "Words List Data File" above. The Future : ------------ I've got tons of ideas for this program. In the future, many improvements could be made to this program, such as : - Extend the search capabilities. In this version of the program : * You can use multiple ? wildcards, but only a single * wildcard. * You cannot mix and match ? and * wildcards in this version of the program. These wildcard search options could be expanded and improved in the future. - Other search methods. - Searching through previous search results. i.e. use the previous searches results as a basis for the next search, so you can quickly home in on the words you need. - Add in the scoring of words (under Scrabble Rules). - Add in the ability to list only words that score over a certain value. - Add in ability to accept or reject words based on their scrabble word scores. - Optimise the search code. e.g. store word lengths in an array to save recalculating these. - Ability to sort words alphabetically or by their scrabble word score in ascending or descending order. - Storing the program in the Windows Tray Bar - with the clock, etc. - Include other word lists with the program. e.g. German words, Spanish words, English dictionary words, etc. - Ability to load other word lists and save word lists to any file. At the moment, word lists are loaded from and saved to the file 'wordlist.dat' which is limiting. - An "Undo" option to reverse or undo the last adding of words to the List of Known Words. - Anything else ? If you would like any of these improvements, or would like to suggest more, please email me and let me know. How much more work I do on this program depends entirely on what support I get, how many people use the program, etc. Reviews / Awards / CDs : ------------------------- None so far. Freeware Information : ----------------------- This is free software. Anyone - any person, any company, or any business - can use this program for free. No fees or payment is required. However, if you find the program useful, then please consider making a PayPal donation to support my efforts. (To make a donation, please run the program and select the "About" option under the Help menu, and then click the PayPal link on the "About" screen). Warranty : ---------- This software and the accompanying files are provided "as is" and without warranties as to performance or merchantability or any other warranties whether expressed or implied. The user assumes the entire risk of using this software. If you do find any faults with this program, email me and let me know. Amendment History : ------------------- Vers Date Description 1.0 25-Jan-2002 First Public Release. (11,547 lines of code / comments.) 1.1 1-Feb-2002 Disaster strikes !! Last night, at about 2:30 AM after a long day at work, and a long evening of coding, I accidentally overwrote the only copy of my source code for Words Worth. So, I had to virtually start from scratch again. Bugger !! So, I took the opportunity to improve a few things : - You can now do single '*' asterisk searches. i.e. find all words in the given range of sizes specified. (Warning: single '*' asterisk searches are slow !!) - You can now do single '?' question mark searches. i.e. find all single letter words. - You can copy the list of words found in a search and paste them into your own documents / files. - You can also abort searches which are in progress, and abort adding words to the list of known words. - The number of words found in a search is also displayed. - Add in a progress bar for adding words. - Add 'A' and 'I' into the YAWL List of Known Words. - Add detection of nude supermodels near client PCs. - Slight improvements to the user interface. - Introduce yet more Anti-Hacker / Anti-Cracker measures. - Remove one of my code libraries that was no longer needed. (10,939 lines of code / comments.) 1.1n 17-Feb-2002 New min-words list version. The shareware version now uses 938 words, which are the exact same word list my Apple ][ version of the program had in 1982. So, the word list data file now spans generations of computers, generations of operating systems, and more than 20 years of time. Pretty cool hey ! (10,939 lines of code / comments.) 1.2 18-Mar-2002 Add in the ability to do Phonetic Searches, so you can now search for all words that sound more or less like another word. Speed up wildcard searches (where the first letter or letters is supplied) by 25 times. (19,887 lines of code / comments.) 1.3 1-June-2002 Add in Reset buttons for each search criteria. Add in the ability to exclude words containing certain letters for all searches. So now, for example, you can find all words that sound like "brain" that don't include the letters "em", etc. (20,666 lines of code / comments.) 1.4 1-Sep-2002 Use-ability enhancements : - When you enter some search criteria and hit the search automatically proceeds. - After the search is complete, the search criteria are highlighted and selected to make it easier for the user to change them and go again. - Change all Search Edit Boxes into Combo Boxes, so that you can easily check back through and repeat any previous searches. Bring the program up to date with my latest code libraries. (24,117 lines of code / comments.) 1.4b 20-Nov-2002 Bring the program up to date with my latest code libraries. (34,672 lines of code / comments.) 1.4f 3-Sep-2007 This program is now FREEWARE - see "Freeware Information" above. If this program was not downloaded from my Home Page, then it is possibly an old version. The latest version of this program is available from my WEB page - see below. Mike "Moose" O'Malley ____________________________________________________ Moose's Software Valley - Established July, 1996. WEB: http://move.to/moose ____________________________________________________