Not your usual crossword

One of my customary "stops" when I get on the computer at night is the Codebreaker Crossword. It differs from standard crosswords in that there are no clues and it uses every letter of the alphabet. Took me a while at first to figure out how it works, but now I can usually finish one pretty quickly. The fun part, at least for me, is building my "expectancy" - given a word this long, with these letters filled in, what words might I expect to be able to fill in? What letters could I expect to see in this position? (In that respect, it sorta resembles an acrostic.) Some of the words used are proper names or foreign words that are relatively common in English, so it's a nice stretch for the vocabulary.