What matches the pattern ?????S?I
What anagrams can you make from the letters of TEARENT
What words end in GRY
What words include DINERS and A or I
What is a good play with AEGLNOT on the Scrabble® rack
What seven letter palindromic words exist
What phrases consist of four four-letter words
What words include five vowels consecutively

Click on each to see a TEA screenshot showing the pattern used to solve the problem and the answers that are found.

What matches the pattern ?????S?I

This sort of problem is very common when solving crosswords. You can use the sequence in the question to form the simplest TEA pattern, a template:

TEA template pattern

water-ski is the most likely answer as it is the only one shown in Core English. 11 other possibilities are shown in Edited English, together with 277 less likely ones in Unedited English.

You can also use a dot instead of a question-mark to indicate the unknown letters.

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What anagrams can you make from the letters of TEARENT

Anagrams often feature in crosswords and other types of word puzzles. To solve them, put a semi-colon at the start of the pattern:

TEA anagram pattern

If you don't know some of the letters in the anagram, you can indicate that with a dot or a question-mark, just as you can with templates.

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What words end in GRY

You can include * as a "wildcard" in the template or anagram part of patterns to match any number of letters. In this case, the * needs to be at the start of the template to indicate that anything can appear at the start of the word:

TEA wildcard pattern

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What words include DINERS and A or I

You can include "choice lists" in the template or anagram part of patterns to indicate letters that must be chosen from a restricted set. Choice lists are enclosed in square brackets. In this case, you would use [ai] to indicate that a letter of the answer can be one of the two possibilities:

TEA choice list pattern

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What is a good play with AEGLNOT on the Scrabble® rack

This sort of problem can be solved by combining the template and anagram patterns. You can use * as the template part, indicating that any length of word will do, and ;AEGLNOT as the anagram part:

TEA template and anagram combined

When the letters matched by the template are fewer than available in the anagram part, the unused letters are shown to the right after a minus sign. The special dictionary used for the above example is ENABLE for Scrabble® Players.

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What seven letter palindromic words exist

You can find the answer to problems involving letter patterns using "letter variables". Each of the digits 0 to 9 must be consistently replaced by the same letter wherever it occurs in the pattern. So it is easy to find palindromes with letter variables:

TEA letter variables

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What phrases consist of four four-letter words

If you include punctuation such as spaces, hyphens and apostrophes in patterns, they must be matched as well as the letters. So to find phrases consisting of four four-letter words, insert spaces in the template pattern:

TEA punctuation matching

The above example shows the alternative method of indicating any letter, using dots rather than question-marks.

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What words include five vowels consecutively

You can use the TEA @ macro to search for vowels as part of patterns. By default, @ means any vowel and # means any consonant:

TEA macros

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