Crossword Puzzle Program
Solve crossword grids, find words by pattern, and automatically cross multiple words with a universal solver.
Why a Crossword Puzzle Program?
It all started with my grandparents.
They love doing crossword puzzles, it's their little weekend ritual.
I often tried to help them find missing words, even though, at the time, I was far from being an expert.
Sometimes, certain definitions were really too complicated, and they would ask me to "take a look on the Internet"... in other words, to help them cheat a little
So, in my junior year of high school, I wanted to help them in my own way, by creating a tool capable of finding words from a pattern
This is how the Crossword Puzzle Program was born, one of my first real personal projects, directly inspired by my CS classes (Computer Science and Digital Sciences), where I had discovered concepts like Hamming distance.
Word Search by Pattern
On the home page, the user enters a pattern like *A*E*, with custom wildcards:
*→ any letter/→ a vowel#→ a consonant
The site instantly displays all matching words, sorted by proximity (exact, one letter different, etc.), with small colored badges to distinguish them.
On mobile, help buttons allow easy insertion of these special characters. (Even in junior year I was already thinking about responsiveness!)
Each word found is clickable and links directly to its definition on Larousse.
Crossing Two Words
A dedicated page allows you to cross two words according to patterns and choose the exact crossing box.
The experience unfolds in three simple steps:
- Enter the two patterns
- Select the crossing point (in a clickable mini-grid)
- Visualize all valid combinations directly in the grid
Each result is interactive: a click is enough to display the chosen crossing.
It's a feature my grandparents like, since it allows eliminating dozens of possibilities at once!
Complete Grid Resolution
In junior year, this was the piece I hadn't managed to finish: the complete grid solver.
Four years later, I decided to revisit the project to give it a facelift... and this time, I finally managed to implement the complete algorithm!
The user can create a custom grid (from 5 to 25 squares), enter a few letters, wildcards or vowels/consonants, then let the universal solver find all possible solutions.
The system:
- automatically detects all horizontal and vertical words,
- uses a backtracking algorithm to explore valid combinations,
- and displays solutions in a clear and colored 2D grid.
Technical Architecture
At the time, I simply used pure HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (I didn't even know TypeScript yet).
I didn't have an SQL database, so I wrote a Python scraper to extract the complete list of French words from a Scrabble site.
The words are then saved in the browser's localStorage, which makes the application usable offline, and completely independent of a server.
It was my first real approach to local storage and algorithmic optimization.
Good Memories?
This project, born from a small family idea, quickly became an experimental ground for algorithms and design.
And even today, my grandparents still use it to solve their grids or, let's be honest, to cheat more effectively
It's one of those projects that remind me why I love coding: starting from a simple, almost anecdotal need, and making something useful, elegant, and fun.
(By the way, it's one of the first projects where I was able to experiment with Git. Looking at the history today, I realize I wasn't really making commits... I was just uploading files)