Anagram solver and word unscrambler

How to use the anagram solver

Type the letters you have, up to 24, and the solver checks them against 246,079 English words in a split second. Four tabs sort the results:

• All words: every word you can make, grouped by length, longest first;
• Anagrams: the words that use all your letters, most common first;
• Best scores: the highest-scoring plays in Scrabble or Words With Friends, bingo bonus included;
• Two-word anagrams: pairs of common words that use exactly your letters, handy for names and phrases.

Add up to two blank tiles with a question mark, and the letters already on the board in the second box. “Hide rare words” leaves out the unusual words that mostly show up in word games. It’s free, there’s no sign-up, and everything runs in your browser.

What is an anagram?

An anagram is a word or phrase made by rearranging all the letters of another one, each letter used exactly once. Listen gives silent, enlist and tinsel; night gives thing; earth gives heart. The best-loved anagrams also play on meaning: dormitory becomes dirty room, astronomer becomes moon starer, and funeral becomes real fun.

The solver finds single-word anagrams in the “Anagrams” tab and two-word ones in “Two-word anagrams”. When your letters don’t form a full anagram, “All words” still lists every shorter word hidden in them.

Unscramble letters for Scrabble and Words With Friends

In “Best scores”, pick your game: the solver adds up the tile values of each word and sorts the plays from highest to lowest. The two games don’t value letters the same way:

QUIZ is worth 22 points in Scrabble and 23 in Words With Friends, before any premium square. Playing all seven tiles of your rack, a bingo, adds 50 points in Scrabble and 35 in Words With Friends: with RETAINS, the solver finds NASTIER, RETAINS, RETINAS and RETSINA, each worth 57 points in Scrabble.

Blank tiles and letters on the board

A blank tile can stand for any letter but scores nothing. Type it as “?” (or “*”), two at most: the letters it plays are shown in blue and left out of the score. With QU?Z, the blank becomes the I of QUIZ.

To build on a word already on the board, type its letters in “Letters on the board”: every result then contains them, and they count toward the score. The bingo bonus only applies when the seven tiles from your rack are all used.

Two-word anagrams for names and phrases

For a name, a title or a short phrase, type all the letters, spaces included if you like: the solver ignores them. It looks for every pair of common words that uses exactly the same letters, without blanks, up to 20 letters. Dormitory, for instance, gives dirty room first. Each pair is shown in alphabetical order, so read it both ways. Rare words are left out on purpose, so the pairs read naturally.

Tips to find more words

• Look for common endings such as -ING, -ED, -ER and -EST, and beginnings such as RE- and UN-: set them aside and rearrange the rest.
• Keep the S: it turns many words into plurals and lets you hook onto words already on the board.
• Learn the short words with expensive letters: QI, ZA, XI, XU and JO are valid two-letter plays.
• Balance your rack: a mix of vowels and consonants, such as RETAINS, leaves the most room for a bingo on the next turn.

About the word list

The solver uses a free English word list built from SCOWL by Kevin Atkinson. It includes the public domain ENABLE list, made for word games, and the UK Advanced Cryptics Dictionary, so both American and British spellings are in. Proper nouns, abbreviations and slurs are left out, and two-letter words follow the lists used in club play.

Tournaments use their own official lists: the NASPA Word List in North America and Collins Scrabble Words in most other countries. Those lists aren’t free to share, so a word found here may occasionally be refused in a club game, or the other way around.

More free tools

• the word counter counts the words and characters of any text;
• the Morse code translator writes and plays any message in Morse;
• the spinning wheel picks a random name, number or yes-or-no answer.