Anagrams Solver: find every word hidden in your letters

How to use the anagrams solver

Ten seconds to learn, five to run. In order:

1. Enter your letters. Type or paste up to 15 letters. Order doesn't matter, so LISTEN and TINSEL return the same results.
2. Add a ? for every blank. Use it for a blank tile or a letter you can't read. The solver tries all 26 letters in that slot.
3. Choose what to show. Every word from these letters lists full-length anagrams and shorter words. Exact anagrams only keeps just the words that use every letter.
4. Pick your dictionary. Select the list your game uses: Scrabble US/Canada (NWL), Scrabble UK/international (Collins), Words With Friends, or all words.
5. Filter and sort. Set a word length if the puzzle asks for one, then sort by length, Scrabble score or alphabetically.
6. Press Solve anagram. Results are grouped by length with the longest words first. Confirm a play in your game's own dictionary before you commit.

One question, one answer here: what can these letters spell? Once positions enter the picture, the better tool is the word generator by pattern. If you want every word that begins or ends a certain way, use words that start with, words that end in or words with letter.

What is an anagram?

An anagram takes every letter of a word and spends them all on a different word, none left over. EVIL, VILE, LIVE and VEIL are anagrams of each other. Even the name is Greek for rearranged letters, which your Scrabble tiles keep demonstrating in practice.

Around the puzzle world, anagram means whatever suits the site saying it. Four meanings dominate:

Three of those four land on this page. Phrases need a two-step: spaces out, letters through the solver, then the pieces joined in the combine word generator. And the wider what-can-I-spell hunt lives on the making words from these letters page.

Anagram solver, word unscrambler, finder, generator: what's the difference?

Every search result wears a different name and they all do roughly the same thing. Leftover letters are what separates them:.

Riddles and bingos want Exact anagrams only. Rack work wants Every word from these letters, because the seven-tile play is rare and the four-tile play is rent money.

Best anagram solver settings for each game

Most players use the solver on a game's own rules. Match the setting to the game and you'll skip a lot of wrong turns.

Which dictionary should you choose?

The same seven letters can be legal here and bounced there. Dictionary first, always.

• NWL (NASPA Word List) is the standard for Scrabble in the US and Canada.
• Collins Scrabble Words runs bigger and wider across the UK and most of the world; a few of its toys can be challenged clean off a North American board.
• Words With Friends keeps its own alphabetical loyalty and its own price chart: an J sells for 8 in Scrabble and 10 in WWF.
• All words opens every gate at once; classrooms and homemade puzzles run on it.

Official lists also change. Words such as OK and EW both walked into North American tournament play in 2018; a printed list from 2015 will not know them.

How to solve anagrams by hand

Owning the skill still pays even with this page a tab away: faster Scrabble turns, pub-quiz saves, and solver results that suddenly all make sense. Seven habits carry it: work on almost any scramble:

1. Split vowels from consonants. Vowels slot between consonants, word shapes surface, and the fog lifts a little.
2. Keep natural pairs together. TH, SH, CH, PH, CK and QU almost always travel as a unit, and Q nearly always needs its U.
3. Hunt for endings. Pull out -ING, -ED, -ER, -EST, -LY, -TION or a plural S first. Two to four letters leave the table in one move, which is the whole game of shrinkage.
4. Hunt for beginnings. RE-, UN-, DE-, DIS-, IN-, EX- and SUB- are the usual suspects.
5. Try likely starting letters. Place a consonant first, then a vowel, and see whether it feels like English.
6. Write the letters in a circle or in alphabetical order. The printed order owns your eye until you break it. A circle on paper breaks it.
7. Find a small word first. Leftovers are the tell: small word found, full answer sitting in the remainder.

When you have a start or end in mind, lists like letter words starting with and letter words ending with, at whatever length the hunch owns.

Using an anagram solver for Scrabble and Words With Friends

Both games deal you seven tiles and both pay for emptying them in one turn. That play, a bingo, is worth 50 bonus points in Scrabble and 35 in Words With Friends. Which is exactly why the seven-letter answers in the results deserve a look before anything shorter.

• Check for a bingo first. Length filter to 7, or 8 when a board letter lets you play through. Thirty seconds of checking can be fifty points.
• Don't chase the longest word. A short word on a double or triple word square, or one that uses a J, Q, X or Z, often beats it. Sort by score, then check the board.
• Think about your leave. What stays on your rack matters as much as what goes on the board. A vowel-consonant balance plays easier next turn than whatever is left after the greedy option.
• Look for hooks. Extending an existing word scores twice in one turn. words that end in and words that start with surface those pairs, and words with letter finds a home for that one stubborn tile.
• Count blanks as zero. Nothing on its face means everything in the right spot. Save it for the bingo; a small play can eat a real tile instead.

The most productive seven-letter rack in English is AEINRST. It forms NASTIER, RETAINS, RETINAS, STAINER, STEARIN, ANTSIER and RATINES. Run it above and judge for yourself; players who study endgame racks tend to defend letters like these with surprising care.

For a fuller play-by-play, go to the dedicated Scrabble word finder or the Words With Friends word finder.

Anagrams in cryptic crosswords

Cryptic setters love anagrams. Every such clue carries fodder (the letters to rearrange) and an indicator (the word admitting the rearrangement), plus a straight definition. Watch it work:

A second example: “Ruined rats make a heavenly body (4)”. Ruined signals the anagram, RATS is the fodder, and STAR is the answer.

Setters reuse the same indicator vocabulary, and it clusters neatly:

Workflow: fodder into the solver, switch on Exact anagrams only, a ? for each crossing letter you can see. A grid half-full like S?R?SS?D is a different tool, though; the word generator by pattern handles shapes much better than this solver does.

How an anagram solver works (and why it's fast)

The brute-force idea dies an early death. Sixteen n letters have n! orderings: LISTEN offers 720, but feed fifteen letters and the count is 1,307,674,368,000. Repeats trim that a bit (ANAGRAM: 7 split by 3! for three A’s, so 840), leave out the fact that precisely one of those is English.

The solver skips ordering entirely. Each dictionary word files in under its sorted letters, and LISTEN, SILENT, ENLIST, TINSEL and INLETS all file neatly to EILNST, so a lookup lands the full set in one move. Shorter words pass a letter-count check instead: never need more than you hold. A ? says one letter may be anything at all.

That is the entire machine. Sixteen letters or six, the server barely notices the difference.

Common anagram solver mistakes

Using Exact mode for Scrabble

Exact mode discards every shorter word, and Scrabble lives off shorter words. Use Every word from these letters unless a riddle demands full-length only.

Forgetting the blank

A blank or smudged tile is a ?. Leaving it implicit throws away the best plays before the search even starts.

Choosing the wrong dictionary

Legal-on-screen does not mean legal-at-the-table. Play by the rulebook’s list.

Typing spaces, hyphens or punctuation

Letters only. DIRTY ROOM goes in as DIRTYROOM; the solver does not read punctuation.

Entering a letter once when it appears twice

Each letter is used as many times as you type it. Type it twice if the puzzle has two.

Expecting names and slang

Your name and every brand name is absent from game dictionaries, so it will not appear in the results either. That is the rulebook speaking, not a bug.

Who uses an anagram solver?

• Word-game players, running a rack through quickly before a Scrabble turn or on a Text Twist roll.
• Students and teachers leaning on anagrams for spelling drills. Every word a letter set can make, laid out on one screen, is a fine way of crossing new words.
• Crossword and quiz fans, decoding a cryptic on Sunday morning or arguing about the pub quiz afterwards.
• Writers and puzzle setters testing a pen name or a clue before publish, and checking whether the letters give embarrassing alternative readings.
• Families who want a calm, screen-light letter game that needs only a pen and a few minutes.

Famous and fun anagram examples

Same letters in both halves of every pair, word for word:

• LISTEN = SILENT
• BELOW = ELBOW
• NIGHT = THING
• DUSTY = STUDY
• METEOR = REMOTE
• FUNERAL = REAL FUN
• DESSERTS = STRESSED
• DEBIT CARD = BAD CREDIT
• SCHOOLMASTER = THE CLASSROOM
• DORMITORY = DIRTY ROOM
• ASTRONOMER = MOON STARER
• THE MORSE CODE = HERE COME DOTS
• ELEVEN PLUS TWO = TWELVE PLUS ONE
• TOM MARVOLO RIDDLE = I AM LORD VOLDEMORT

The last line is structural fiction: the reveal in Harry Potter only lands because every letter agrees, which is exactly what an anagram demands. The rest of the list is practice material. Cover one column, work out the other, then play self-check.

A short history of anagrams

Letter-craft is old news. Lycophron, a poet in Alexandria around the 3rd century BC, gets most of the credit for starting the game, and by the Renaissance, writers used anagrams to tuck secrets into verse. Rabelais published as Alcofribas Nasier, a scrambled signature, his own name parked inside for anyone patient to look.

Science had its own use: claiming a discovery with the evidence still concealed. Galileo announced his Saturn observations in 1610 as a plain letter-scramble, and Hooke published spring theory in 1676 under ceiiinosssttuv, which unscrambles to ut tensio, sic vis. Crosswords, jumbles and classrooms carry the tradition today while computers sweep millions of arrangements without breaking sweat.

Anagram solver FAQ