In order to keep the e’s out of half the Ubercross Abecedaria E grid, I couldn’t rely on my own memory or my usual software, not without some modifications.
Crossword Compiler, like several of its competitors, allows you to build your own word list and to switch out one word list for another. For the purposes of Ubercrossing, I’d already built some huge word lists. Now I had to take the sum total of the ones I had…and filter all the e-containing entries out of them for a new list.
That was the easy part. Using the same “Scrabble method” that I’d used to emphasize other letters in their appropriate grids, I assigned “E” a point value of one, made every other letter a point value of zero, sorted words by point value, deleted everything over zero, and built a brand-new word list from the results. Last I checked, my e-less word list had 89,469 entries…a fraction of my bigger lists, but formidable enough, I hoped.
Then I got to filling. The e-less list just barely got me through at some points—those six-letter-crossing-six-letter sections were a killer. But I enjoyed finding the really long phrases that had no e’s and dropping those in early on. I filled the e-less section first, then switched back to a standard word list for the rest of it.
By the end, I had a much clearer sense of what my real limitations were, and could move forward to the rest of the grids with greater confidence. I also had my ambitions sharpened. I wondered: could I maybe extend this e-less phenomenon to the clues?
Tomorrow: No.