This cryptogram helper is a special form of a dictionary search. It is designed to identify words with the same pattern of repeated letters. For example REED and WOOF would be judged the same (both are four letter words with three unique letters, one repeated in the middle). This is useful if you're trying to solve a cryptogram puzzle. For example, the word albatross has a distinctive pattern of unique letters. The first letter (b) occurs again at the 4th position. And the last two letters are the same. This pattern can be used to find similar words (there are, in fact, only 8 such words).
If you're trying to solve a cryptogram puzzle, spotting these unique sequences can help you quickly crack large words in the puzzle. A good approach is to spot the letters used in one and two letter words (since those tend to be things like 'A' or 'I') and then feed the most complicated looking word in the puzzle that includes those letters into a cryptogram helper. In the example above, knowing that the first and forth letter is likely A would help the codebreaker quickly zoom in on "albatross" as a solution, since that is the only letter with an A (or I, for that matter) in those positions. Since this would give you a good solution to seven other unique letters, this may be enough to bust the cryptogram puzzle wide open.
If you already know a couple of letters in the code word, take a look at our hangman solver .