Every time someone types a pattern into Crossword Cracker, the site counts it. Not who typed it or where from - just the pattern, like ch??t, and how many times it has been asked. Sixteen months of that adds up to a picture of where crossword solvers actually get stuck.
The word that stumps solvers most is SQUEEZE
Some patterns leave only one word in the dictionary that fits. When people keep typing those, it tells us which answers they could not see even with most of the letters in front of them. Adding up every one-answer pattern, word by word, gives this list.
Five of the twelve contain a Z, a K or a Q. Those letters are rare enough that solvers do not think to try them. DREAMT is one of very few English words that end in MT, so the ending looks wrong even when it is right. DILEMMA and EERIE have doubled letters, which the eye tends to skip. And SEGUE and SHEIKH are spelled nothing like they sound.
Further down the list the pattern holds: HAIKU, ENNUI, ERSATZ, GULAG, BAYOU and OKAPI all appear in the top sixty. Words borrowed from other languages break the spelling habits English speakers rely on.
A third of all searches are for five letters
Five-letter answers account for more searches than any other length, by a wide margin. Seven comes second, ahead of six.
Letters in the answer. Until October 2026 the search box stopped at eight letters, so longer answers are missing from this count.
If you know the length, there is a word finder set up for each of the common ones: 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8 letters.
People search when they have three letters in five
Whatever the length of the answer, solvers turn to a search at almost the same point: when about 60% of the letters are filled in. That is 3 of 5, 3.5 of 6, 4 of 7 and 4.5 of 8, on average. Nearly a quarter of searches (23.6%) are missing just one letter, and another third are missing two.
For five-letter answers, the most common thing to be missing is the first letter. Next comes the alternating pattern you get from a British-style grid, where every other square is crossed by another answer.
- 6.9%
- 6.5%
- 6.1%
- 5.8%
- 5.5%
Filled squares are letters the solver already had. There are 30 possible shapes; these five make up 31% of five-letter searches.
E is the letter everyone already has
Of all the letters people type in, 17% are E. In the dictionary itself E makes up about 12% of letters, so it turns up in searches far more than chance would suggest. A comes second at 10.5%. At the other end, J, Q, X and Z together make up barely 1% of the letters typed - which fits with the list above. The rare letters are the ones solvers are missing, not the ones they have.
About one search in eight (13%) includes a doubled letter that the solver has already filled in, like the ee in ??ee?e or the ff in ?ff??.
One search in six finds nothing
Most searches do their job. Over half come back with between one and five answers, which is usually enough to spot the right one.
Estimated from a random sample of 4,000 searches.
But about 16% find no word at all. A few of those are words the dictionary did not have, which is how we found it was missing QUETZAL and AIOLI. Some are answers longer than eight letters that the old search box cut short. Many, though, look like a wrong letter somewhere else in the grid.
DAFFODIL is the best example. It was searched for 108 times with the right letters, as d?ff?d??. It was also searched for at least 90 times as diffid??, deffed?? and daffad??, none of which can ever match. If a search comes back empty, the likeliest culprit is a crossing answer you were sure about.
How we counted
The figures cover every search made on the crossword solver between 12 June 2025 and 5 October 2026. The site stores only the pattern typed and a running count. It does not record who searched, when each repeat happened, or anything about the person.
"One possible answer" means one match in Crossword Cracker's own word list of about 86,000 words, which covers British, American, Australian and Canadian spellings. A bigger dictionary would find second answers for some patterns. The stumper list counts patterns searched three or more times, to keep one-off typing slips out of it.
You are welcome to quote these figures or reuse the charts with a link back to this page.