Clue, the British English crossword helper

If I get stuck on a crossword clue I will eventually resort to grep‘ing /usr/share/dict/* or one of the many online tools that do the same thing. They all have a couple of things in common: they aren’t optimised for small touchscreen devices (I’m nearly always using my phone when I need one of these tools), and they use American English spelling variants.

So, for fun I made the crossword clue tool I want: one which uses British English and has a simple interface with large text.

The code is on github, and it’s deployed publicly on clue.hjst.org.

It’s at the point now where it’s useful enough for my purposes; I may add to it in the future if time/inclination permits. It’s deployed to the free usage tier on Heroku, where my quick testing with ab suggests it can handle around 3 pattern searches per second before it starts to bog down.

If you have any suggestions for alternate word lists to use as sources, or general feedback on the HTML/JS UI I put together, then please drop me a line.