Anagram Solver

What your letters can actually spell

A pile of letters looks infinite and almost never is. Seven tiles can be arranged 5,040 ways, and on a good rack fewer than ten of those arrangements are words. The gap between those two numbers is the entire experience of being stuck.

• 168,491 words searched, from two letters to fifteen
• 83% of them have no anagram at all — their letters spell nothing else
• 12 words share the letters AEPRS — the dictionary's biggest anagram family

Using it

Type or paste your letters in the box. Spaces, apostrophes and punctuation are thrown away, so a name, a Scrabble rack or a whole phrase can go in exactly as you have it. Results appear as you type, gathered into columns by length with the longest words first, and clicking any word copies it. Four controls change what comes back.

• Any length / Every letter The loose reading and the strict one. Any length shows everything your tiles can pay for — right when you're hunting a play on a board. Every letter keeps only true anagrams, which is what a puzzle usually wants.
• Multi-word Spends the whole rack across two or three words instead of one, so DORMITORY can come back as DIRTY ROOM. Off by default; it's a different question from "what can I play here?".
• Points Tags every result with its Scrabble or Words With Friends value and sorts the longest, richest words to the front. A letter covered by a blank is tinted and scores zero, exactly as on a real board.
• Everyday words only Hides the tournament-list obscurities — the PRASEs and SECPARs — and leaves 9,803 words a person might actually say. Useful when you're writing something rather than playing.

A question mark stands for a blank tile — up to three. Blanks widen the search enormously (a single one turns a seven-tile rack into every word those six letters plus any seventh can make), so the letter a blank stood in for is tinted in the results. Under Narrow it down sit the four filters that matter once a crossing letter is fixed: starts with, ends with, contains, and a pattern box where C?T means C, any letter, T.

Anagram, or just unscrambling?

Strictly, an anagram uses every letter. Most tools labelled "anagram solver" quietly ignore that and return everything, because most people arrive with a Scrabble rack rather than a purist definition. This one does both and makes the switch visible instead of guessing which you meant. If your letters came from a word somebody scrambled, the word unscrambler is the narrower tool for exactly that — same dictionary, whole-word answers only, and it takes a page of jumbles at a time.

• Every letter

  The strict reading: all your letters, nothing left over. TRIANGLE → INTEGRAL. It's the mode for a puzzle that promises the letters rearrange into something.

  Most racks have no strict anagram at all, so this list is often short — or empty.

• Any length

  Everything the rack can afford, including words that leave letters behind. TRIANGLE → TRAIN, GRANITE, ALTERING.

  This is the default, because "no results" is a useless answer when twelve shorter words were sitting right there.

The multi-word search restores the strict rule in a different shape: every letter again, only spread across two or three words. That's where the famous ones live — ASTRONOMER into MOON STARER, SCHOOLMASTER into THE CLASSROOM — and a single-word solver can never find one.

The dictionary, named out loud

A solver is only as honest as the list behind it, and most sites won't tell you what theirs is. Ours is ENABLE — the Enhanced North American Benchmark Lexicon, assembled by Alan Beale and released into the public domain in the 1990s, and the list underneath a great many free word games. To it we add WordiBop's own curated answer lists, which cover words ENABLE was compiled too early to know: it has never heard of INBOX or WEBSITE. Slurs are stripped out.

Three things are deliberately not in there. No proper nouns, so PARIS and NEWTON will never surface — an anagram of a name has to be assembled by hand, or found in the multi-word list. No hyphens or spaces, so every entry is a single solid word. And no guarantee of tournament legality: ENABLE overlaps heavily with the official Scrabble word lists but is not one of them, and those differ between North America and the rest of the world anyway.

Treat a result as “this is a word”, not “this will survive a challenge in a rated game”.

How the search works

The trick is to stop thinking about order. Rearranging letters is expensive to simulate — ten tiles have over three million arrangements — but you never need to. Two words are anagrams exactly when they contain the same letters in the same quantities, so counting replaces shuffling.

1. Count, don't permute. LISTEN and SILENT both reduce to the same tally — one each of E, I, L, N, S, T. So does your rack. Order stops mattering the moment you write the letters down as counts.
2. Ask whether you can afford it. A word is playable when every one of its counts is less than or equal to yours. That test costs about as much as the word is long, which is why it can run across the whole dictionary between keystrokes rather than behind a button. Blanks simply allow a shortfall — up to as many letters as you have blanks — and the search remembers which ones they covered.
3. Only fetch what you could use. Words are grouped by length, each group packed into one long string with no separators — the seven-letter group is every seven-letter word run together, read back seven characters at a time. A rack can't spell a word longer than itself, so five typed letters download four small groups and nothing else.

• 2 letters 96
• 3 letters 968
• 4 letters 3,889
• 5 letters 8,622
• 6 letters 15,215
• 7 letters 23,098
• 8 letters 28,420
• 9 letters 24,873
• 10 letters 20,302
• 11 letters 15,504
• 12 letters 11,358
• 13 letters 7,827
• 14 letters 5,127
• 15 letters 3,192

A seven-tile rack downloads only the highlighted rows — 51,888 words, 31% of the list. The rest arrives if, and only if, you type something long enough to spell it.

Finding two-word anagrams

Splitting a rack across several words is a harder problem, and it's where solvers usually either give up or drown you. The naive version tries every word, subtracts it, then tries every word again on what's left — against a 168,491-word list, that's tens of billions of pairs. Two decisions make it instant instead.

The second decision is which words to search. Multi-word runs over the everyday list, not the full dictionary — a deliberate loss of coverage, and worth it: the full list splits almost any long rack into hundreds of pairs like SPAM ODOUR and ATT NIRLS, burying the one result you'd actually repeat aloud. Everyday words in, readable phrases out. If you're chasing a rearrangement of a name and the tool comes up empty, that's usually why — the answer exists but leans on a word we've kept out of the friendly list.

Solving anagrams without a solver

The reason to know how it's done by hand is that a puzzle gets more fun, not less, once you can. Four habits do most of the work.

• LISTEN Break the lock If the letters are shown as a readable word, your eye keeps re-reading it. Rewrite them in a circle, or a random cloud, so no order is suggested — the point is to stop seeing the arrangement you're trying to escape.
• JVKW Spend the awkward letters first A V fits in far fewer places than an E. Ask what it can even do — it never ends a word, it wants a vowel straight after — and the rack collapses into a handful of options.
• AEIOU Count your vowels English runs about two consonants to every vowel. Five vowels and two consonants says the answer is short, or leans on a pair like OO or EA. One vowel tells you where the syllable break has to be.
• AEPRS Learn signatures, not words Competitive players don't memorise PARSE, PEARS, SPARE separately; they memorise AEPRS and the family hanging off it. It's the same move the search makes, done with a brain — and it's why they see the answer before consciously rearranging anything.

The second habit is the one worth measuring, because "awkward" turns out to have a number. What makes a letter hard isn't how rare it is in prose — it's how few words will take it at all.

• Most accommodating
• E 69.6%
• S 59.6%
• I 58.3%
• A 53.7%
• R 51.9%
• Fussiest — spend these first
• W 6.6%
• Z 3.9%
• X 2.6%
• Q 1.5%
• J 1.4%

E sits in 70% of all words; J manages 1.4%. That gap is why an unplaced J is worth more of your attention than the four vowels next to it — and why it's the letter to spend first.

What the word list says about anagrams

Counting the whole dictionary turns up a fact that surprises most people. Anagrams feel common because the famous ones are memorable, but being anagrammable is a lucky property of a word, not a normal one.

• On its own 83.0%
• One partner 11.3%
• Two 3.4%
• Three 1.2%
• Four or more 1.0%

83% of English words have no anagram whatsoever — their letters spell nothing else at all. Just 2.2% live in a family of four or more.

The luck concentrates in short words made of common letters. The largest family in the whole list is five letters long, not fifteen: AEPRS spells 12 different words — APERS, APRES, ASPER, PARES, PARSE, PEARS, PRASE, PRESA, RAPES, REAPS, SPARE, SPEAR — because every letter in it is one of the ones English uses constantly. LISTEN's family runs to 6 (ELINTS, ENLIST, INLETS, LISTEN, SILENT, TINSEL) for the same reason. Long words, built from rarer letters in fussier combinations, almost always stand alone.

You can watch the same effect in the tool. Two racks, both seven tiles, differing by two letters:

• 256 words from RETINAS — seven of the most cooperative letters in the language, and 9 of them use all seven
• 69 words from RETIJVS — the same rack with the A and N swapped for a J and a V

When a solver is the right tool

Nobody needs permission to use one, but it's worth being clear about what it does to a puzzle. Against a friend, mid-game, it's cheating and everyone knows it. Everywhere else it earns its keep.

• Confirming a hunch You already suspect the word is real. One look settles it, and nothing about the puzzle was solved for you.
• Breaking a stall A jumble that's held you up for twenty minutes has stopped being fun. Take the one word and carry on under your own steam.
• Hunting a name Titles, pseudonyms and party tricks. Multi-word search is the mode for this, and the everyday list is what keeps the results sayable.
• Reviewing afterwards The use we'd argue for hardest. Feed in a rack you've finished with and see what you missed — look up AEINRST once and you'll know that family for life.

Cryptic crossword solvers have a particular use for it. In a cryptic, anagrams hide behind signal words — confused, broken, at sea, cooked, drunk — and once you've spotted the signal, the fodder is right there in the clue while the definition tells you what you're aiming at. Dropping the fodder in here with the pattern filter set to the crossing letters you already have turns a twenty-minute stare into a five-second confirmation.

More anagram puzzling on WordiBop

If you'd rather play than solve, the site is mostly games. Anagram puzzles deal rounds of pairs where the source word stays readable and the answer is the mystery — including the famous phrase anagrams and the story of how anagrams once served as scientific copyright. Word scrambles run the same letters the other way, arriving jumbled for you to restore, and the scramble maker builds printable worksheets from your own list. Anagram crosswords are an entire grid where every clue is an anagram of its answer, and the letter wheel asks the question this tool answers — how many words live in these seven letters — but makes you find them yourself.