While organizing old files recently, I stumbled upon a small program I wrote around 2011.

Have you ever played a game called Bookworm? It’s made by PopCap. The game tells the story of a bookworm defeating a demon, and to progress and fight bosses, you need to spell words. If I recall correctly, you’re given a 3x3 or 4x4 matrix containing letters a-z or * (representing any letter), and you need to spell the longest word possible – the longer the word, the more damage dealt to the demon. So I wrote a little program to help my not-so-great vocabulary spell the longest words possible. It requires a word list as a prerequisite; there’s a dictionary.txt in the project’s doc folder containing about 7000+ words that needs to be loaded first.

1. Main program interface:

2. Loading the dictionary:

3. Entering characters:

4. Getting the result list:

GitHub: https://github.com/hujiulin/Bookworm

Project notes:

• Written in C++ around 2011 [the code is a bit messy]. Can be opened with VC 6.0 or Visual Studio.
• This program finds the longest possible words.
• Input letters [a-z or *] to get a list of answers. [* represents any letter]
• This was my first ever small program. I recently found it among old files, so I’m sharing it here :).