This form will send @zbanks your current query, your browser name, and the above text.
Noodle is a tool to find words or phrases that match certain conditions.
It’s similar to Regular Expressions, Nutrimatic, qhex Word Play, or Qat.
a or A – the letter a itself (case-insensitive)' (apostrophe) – any punctuation, such as an apostrophe, dash, or period._ (underscore) – space (word boundary). – any letter[abc] or [a-c] – one of a, b, or c[^abc] – one letter except a, b, or c* – zero or more copies of the previous symbol+ – one or more copies of the previous symbol? – one or zero copies of the previous symbol{3} – exactly three copies of the previous symbol{3,} – at least three copies of the previous symbol{,5} – at most five copies of the previous symbol{3,5} – between three and five (inclusive) copies of the previous symbol(abcd) – group of abcd, usually used with *, +, ?, or {…}.(ab|cd|ef) – either ab, cd, or ef<ate> – anagram of ate: ate, eat, eta, tea<ate+> – superanagram of ate: abate, acute, fated, neat, …<ate+3> – transadd of 3 to ate: abated, advent, basket, …<ate-> – subanagram of ate: ate, at, a, eat, …<ate-1> – transdelete of 1 to ate: at, Ta(ate:-) – subset of ate: ate, at, a(ate:+) – superset of ate: abate, acted, fated, …(abcd:^) – substring of abcd: a, cd!_ – use explicit spaces for this line!' – use explicit punctuation for this line!1 – use fuzzy search for this line, within an edit distance of 14 5 on its own line – enumeration: match 4 letters, a space, then 5 lettersVOWEL=[aeiou] on its own line – define a macro VOWEL to use in later lines//, /*…*/ – comment, ignore text (like in C, Javascript, etc.)Specify filters in the input textbox. Each line is treated as a noodle expression. You can specify multiple expressions, and only results that match all expressions are returned.
The query runs until one of the following:
Stop button is pressedNoodle supports the following regular expression syntax: […], [^…], ., *, +, ?, (…), |, {…}.
Before matching, words are converted to lowercase and stripped of whitespace and non-alphabetical symbols (punctuation, numbers).
To explicitly match spaces, include “!_” at the end of the expression. When enabled, spaces can be explicitly matched with the “_” character.
To explicitly match other symbols, include “!'” at the end of the expression. When enabled, these symbols can be matched with the “'” character.
Regardless of setting, and unlike normal regular expressions, the period (“.”) is only equivalent to “[a-z]”. To match any symbol, use “[a-z'_]”.
Noodle expressions do not support backreferences (e.g. “\1”). Additionally, because the input is pre-processed to have a limited alphabet, noodle expressions do not support escape characters, or character classes like “[:alpha:]”.
Noodle has additional support for anagram-like constriants with angle bracket syntax: <...>
<abcd> – anagram of abcd: rearranging the given letters<abcd+> – superanagram of abcd: rearranging at least the given letters<abcd+3> – transadd of 3 to abcd: rearranging all of the given letters plus N wildcards<abcd-> – subanagram of abcd: rearranging at most the given letters<abcd-1> – transdelete of 1 to abcd: rerranging all but N of the given letters(abcd:-) – subset of abcd: contained within a subset of the given expression, in the same order(abcd:+) – superset of abcd: contains the superset of the given expression, in the same order(abcd:^) – substring of abcd: contained within the given expression (consecutively)Anagram constraints are not compatible with fuzzy matching, and may result in false positives (but not false negatives!).
Bare numbers are a shortcut to define an enumeration.
The expression 3 3 8 7 looks for a 4-word phrase, consisting of two 3-letter words, followed by an 8-letter word, then a 7-letter word.
Noodle supports performing fuzzy matching for certain expressions.
This will find words & phrases that would match within a given edit distance of the expression.
To allow matches within edit distance 2, include “!2” at the end of the expression.
Fuzzy matching can make queries take much longer, so it works best when there are additional constraints.
If there are multiple constraints with fuzzy matching, the edits between expressions may not be consistent. For example, "hey" will match the query "hen !1; hay !1" even though the edits to get to “hen” or “hay” are different.
Anagram-like constraints (“<…>”) are incompatible with fuzzy matching, and may produce false positives.
Macros allow you to define a common subexpression, which can be useful when working with repeated letters from a letterbank.
Macros are defined with NAME=expression... syntax on their own lines.
Macros are substituted in later lines before parsing, using a naive find-replace in the order they are defined.
STATE=(al|ak|az|ar|ca|co|ct|de|fl|ga|hi|id|il|in|ia|ks|ky|la|me|md|ma|mi|mn|ms|mo|mt|ne|nv|nh|nj|nm|ny|nc|nd|oh|ok|or|pa|ri|sc|sd|tn|tx|ut|vt|va|wa|wv|wi|wy)ELEMENT=(h|he|li|be|b|c|n|o|f|ne|na|mg|al|si|p|s|cl|ar|k|ca|sc|ti|v|cr|mn|fe|co|ni|cu|zn|ga|ge|as|se|br|kr|rb|sr|y|zr|nb|mo|tc|ru|rh|pd|ag|cd|in|sn|sb|te|i|xe|cs|ba|hf|ta|w|re|os|ir|pt|au|hg|tl|pb|bi|po|at|rn|fr|ra|rf|db|sg|bh|hs|mt|ds|rg|cn|uut|fl|uup|lv|uus|uuo|la|ce|pr|nd|pm|sm|eu|gd|tb|dy|ho|er|tm|yb|lu|ac|th|pa|u|np|pu|am|cm|bk|cf|es|fm|md|no|lr)Ctrl-Enter – submit queryNext to each result, there are 3 links to common actions:
c – copy the result to the clipboardg – look up the result on Googlew – look up the result on Wikipediax – look up the result as a clue on Crossword SolverYou can query Noodle directly from Google Sheets! Here’s an example formula:
=IMPORTDATA(CONCAT("https://noodle.fly.dev/query/", ENCODEURL("yourqueryhere")))You can wrap it in TRANSPOSE(...) to have it fill out horizontally instead of vertically.
You can separate mutli-line queries with semicolons (;) instead of newlines.
For GET requests like this, the timeout is lowered, default results limit is lowered to 15 (this can be changed with e.g. #limit 100;).
The input wordlists are described below, and can be downloaded by following these links:
It is based on the Debian wordlist, Wikipedia, and Wiktionary.
Noodle is open-source and released under the MIT license.
Visit GitHub to fork the code or submit bugs. There is also a command-line version available for running offline/locally.