What an anagram solver does
An anagram is a word made by rearranging all the letters of another word. Every letter gets used exactly once. The word listen has five letters. So do silent, enlist, tinsel, inlets and elints. This dictionary confirms all six as anagrams of each other. Type any word or letter set into the box above and the tool returns every exact match it knows.
An unscramble is different. An unscrambler takes a rack of letters and finds every word you can build from some or all of them. You do not have to use every letter. The letters l, e, a, g, e make eagle, but they also make gale, glee, age, gel and lea. Those shorter words are not anagrams of eagle. They are just words your rack can spell. This page handles exact anagrams first. Flip the toggle if you also want the shorter words.
The dictionary behind the tool is ENABLE, short for Enhanced North American Benchmark Lexicon. It holds 172,823 English words in lowercase. It has no proper nouns, no hyphens and no apostrophes. Words are ranked common first using frequency buckets from Google's web word counts. About 78,826 of the entries have a frequency bucket. The rest are rare. A search across all 172,823 words takes a fraction of a second in your browser.
How to use it for a daily jumble
Daily jumble puzzles give you a set of letters and a clue. The answer is usually one word that uses every letter. Enter the letters and read the exact anagram list. If nothing looks right, check the shorter words. Puzzle makers sometimes build the answer from a phrase, and this tool does not attempt multi-word anagrams or proper names.
Here is a worked example. Suppose your letters are l, e, a, g, e. The exact anagram list is short because the letters must all be used. The five-letter word is eagle. Turn on shorter words and you also get gale, glee, age, gel and lea. Each one uses some of your letters, never more than you have. Results are grouped by length, longest first. Within a length, higher point words come first, then common words.
Scoring uses standard tile values. In Scrabble, e is 1, a is 1, g is 2 and l is 1. Eagle scores 6 points face value. The tool does not add board premium squares. A double or triple word square on a real board can change the total. The same letters in Words With Friends score differently because the tile values differ. There, g is 3 and l is 2, so eagle scores 8.
Why some words never show up
The dictionary has limits, and they matter when you compare results to a game.
- Proper names are not included. You will not find an anagram of your name if it depends on a capitalized word.
- Multi-word phrases are not attempted. The tool looks for single words only.
- Hyphens and apostrophes are not in the list, so words like mother-in-law cannot appear.
- ENABLE is close to, but not identical to, the official Scrabble list (NASPA or Collins) and the Words With Friends list. A word found here may be rejected by a game. A game may also accept a word that is not here.
If you are playing a specific game, check its own dictionary before you commit to a play. The Scrabble word finder and the Words With Friends page explain the point differences in more detail. The how we calculate page covers the ranking method.
Anagrams of my name and other searches
People often search for anagrams of my name. This tool can help, but only with the letters themselves. It will not use a capitalized name as a source word, and it will not produce a capitalized result. If your name has seven letters, you may get a handful of exact anagrams and many shorter words. Common letters like e, a, s and t produce more matches than rare letters like q, x and z.
The same idea works for a Wordle guess. The Wordle solver uses 8,636 five-letter words from the same dictionary. It filters by green, yellow and grey letters. The anagram solver on this page is for full rearrangements, not for pattern matching. If you need wildcard patterns, the word finder handles those with ? and * symbols.
One last note on blanks. In the unscrambler, a question mark stands for any letter and scores zero points. The anagram solver does not use blanks because an anagram must rearrange the exact letters you have. If you want to test a blank, use the unscrambler instead.