Every tool on this site searches the same word list in your browser. This page says which list, how words are matched and scored, and where the results can differ from a game's own dictionary.
The dictionary
The word list is ENABLE (Enhanced North American Benchmark Lexicon), a public-domain list of 172,823 English words: lowercase, no proper nouns, no hyphens or apostrophes. It was assembled for word games and is close to the lists Scrabble and Words With Friends use, but it is not either of them. A word found here may be rejected in a game, and a game may accept a word that is not here. When it matters, check the word in the game before you play it.
Words are ranked "common first" using frequency buckets from 0 to 9 derived from Google's web word counts as published by Peter Norvig. 78,826 words have a bucket; the remaining 93,997 are rare enough to have no count, and sort last.
Unscrambling
For each word in the list, the tool checks that every letter of the word is available in your rack, using each rack letter at most once. A word may use fewer letters than you typed. A blank (typed as ?, _ or *) stands for any one letter and scores zero. Results are grouped by length, longest first; within a length, by points, then common words first, then alphabetically.
Filters narrow the search before matching: starts with and ends with compare the word's ends, contains looks for the letters in order anywhere in the word (so a board letter you must play through), and length keeps one word length. The minimum length is 2.
Anagrams
An anagram uses every letter exactly once, so the anagram solver is the unscrambler with the length fixed to the number of letters you typed and blanks disallowed. Multi-word anagrams and proper names are not attempted.
Scoring
| Letters | Scrabble | Words With Friends |
|---|---|---|
| A E I O R S T | 1 | 1 |
| L N U | 1 | 2 |
| D | 2 | 2 |
| G | 2 | 3 |
| B C | 3 | 4 |
| M P | 3 | 4 |
| H | 4 | 3 |
| Y | 4 | 3 |
| F W | 4 | 4 |
| V | 4 | 5 |
| K | 5 | 5 |
| X | 8 | 8 |
| J | 8 | 10 |
| Q Z | 10 | 10 |
| Blank | 0 | 0 |
The points shown are the face value of the tiles: quiz is 22 in Scrabble and 23 in Words With Friends. Premium squares on the board (double and triple letter or word) are not included, because the tool does not know where you will play.
Wordle
The Wordle solver filters the 8,636 five-letter words in the list. A green letter must be at that position. A yellow letter must be in the word and must not be at the position you tried it. A grey letter must not be in the word, with one refinement for double letters: if the same letter is grey in one place and green or yellow in another, the word contains exactly as many copies as the green and yellow marks account for. Candidates are ranked common words first, then by how many frequently occurring letters they contain, so a good next guess sits near the top. The site does not hold the game's own answer list and does not know the day's answer.
Pattern finder
The pattern becomes a search where ? or _ matches exactly one letter and * matches any run of letters, including none. Letter order matters. Up to 500 matches are shown, common first.
Speed and privacy
The word list (about 1.9 MB uncompressed, around 0.5 MB as sent) downloads once per visit and is searched in your browser. A search over all 172,823 words takes a fraction of a second. Your letters never leave your device.
Checking the code
The matching and scoring live in /source/words.js, with automated tests including the anagram set listen, silent, enlist, tinsel. Missing word or wrong score? Tell us.