TL:DR: Click the “More…” button on the XWord Info Finder page to see new “Words with digits” and “Words with symbols” buttons.
In a recent Crossword Fiend post, blogger (and constructor) Zachary David Levy (not necessarily an odd character himself) mistakenly insisted that, while ampersands were used in several pre-Shortz puzzles, they had never appeared in a grid during Will Shortz’s tenure. He didn’t make this assertion blithely. He first went to XWord Info and searched for *&* and only pre-Shortz results appeared.
XWord Info used to fail those kinds of requests because of two different but related problems. I never bothered to fix them because they seemed uncommon, but it turns out they’re interesting, so I took a crack at both issues.
Problem 1: Bogus answers
Many words that appear in NYT puzzles are marked as “bogus”, so they won’t appear in our word lists. Bogus words include wacky phrases that only make sense in the context of some trick puzzle, or words with non-alphabetic characters. So, answer words with & are automatically marked bogus, and won’t appear in Finder results unless the Show bogus answers checkbox is clicked.
Solution 1: Auto-bogus
My quick solution, then, is to automatically click that checkbox if I notice you using an odd character. It stays on until you unclick it.
Here — you can try that *&* search yourself.
Problem 2: Wildcard characters
This one is trickier. Wildcard characters are ones that stand in for real characters. The two most common are ? meaning any single character, and * meaning any number of characters. For example, p???h finds PATCH and PSYCH, and a*e finds ACNE and ABSINTHE.
Four other wildcard characters are used in less common cases:
@ # . %
Solution 2: Better guesses
The problem is it’s difficult, and sometimes impossible, to tell if a user is intending to look for one of those symbols, or to use them as a wildcard. I added some logic to make better guesses, so now you can type in *.* or *#* and get the results you expect. (Those two get converted to a regex for you, because that’s what works.)
By the way, if Zachary David Levy had chosen to look for an exclamation mark instead of an ampersand, he’d see that it is a character only used in pre-Shortz puzzles: *!*
Quick view of all non-alphabetic answers
Click the “More…” button on the Finder page to reveal extra buttons useful for writing clues or hearing pronunciations. I added two new buttons to show all the answer words with digits or with symbols. There are surprisingly many. H20 has been used 7 times, A&E has been used 4 times.