“What is the compound distribution feature offered on your home page, and how do I use it?”

A compound word is a valid word formed by jamming two or more shorter words together (e.g., cook­top, hymn­book, time­line). Some solvers find words like this particularly difficult to spot in the hive, so to help out we’ve provided an optional auxiliary grid that breaks them down by length and first letter. Refer to this example for a puzzle with an unusual number of compounds, where you can see the distribution grid in action.

Please be aware that our definition of what constitutes a compound word could be considered somewhat quirky. Please note also that compound distributions are only available for current and past puzzles, not for general string lookups. There are simply too many words in the English language for us to vet them all!

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