Anagram Solver

What the anagram solver does

Short answer: it finds every playable word hidden in your letters. Type any letters into the box above and the solver checks them against our curated dictionary of 45,525 words, covering lengths from four to 14 letters. In perfect mode it returns only words that use every letter exactly once, the way SILENT rearranges into LISTEN. In sub-anagram mode it returns every word you can build from any subset of your letters, which is what you want for a rack of tiles, a word wheel or any letters round where the best answer is usually shorter than the full set.

Every result is a real dictionary word with its own definition page, so you can check what an unfamiliar find actually means before you play it. Results arrive grouped by length with the longest words first, each carrying its base Scrabble score, and one click re-sorts them by score.

How the anagram solver works

The whole thing runs in your browser. The word list downloads once when the page loads, and every search after that happens locally, recalculating as you type. There are no server round trips and nothing to wait for.

The matching is built on letter counting rather than rearranging. Your input is normalised first, lowercased with anything that is not a letter stripped out. The solver then counts each letter. RETAINS becomes one each of R, E, T, A, I, N and S, while BANANA becomes three As, two Ns and one B.

Each dictionary word gets the same treatment, and the comparison is a simple containment test. In sub-anagram mode a word matches when it needs no more of any letter than you have available. In perfect mode the test runs in both directions, so the word must have exactly the same letter counts as your input, and the same length. Anything longer than your input is skipped outright, as is anything under your chosen minimum length.

This is why the tool feels instant. It never generates permutations. Seven distinct letters can be arranged in 5,040 different orders, but counting letters means each dictionary word is checked exactly once in a single pass. Matches come back sorted longest first and alphabetically within each length, or ranked by base Scrabble tile values if you switch the sort. Your letters, mode and minimum length are also written into the page address, so any search shares as a plain link.

Worked example: unscrambling RETAINS

RETAINS is a classic solver input because all seven of its letters sit near the top of English letter-frequency tables. Common letters produce long result lists and rare letters short ones, so this is close to a best case. Our letter-frequency research shows exactly which letters do the heavy lifting.

Perfect mode applies the strict test, and right now it comes back empty for RETAINS in our dictionary. A perfect anagram needs another word with exactly the same seven letters, and most letter combinations never manage it. Famous rearrangements such as RETINAS and NASTIER are valid in our wider guess dictionary and will appear here once they earn a published definition.

Switch to sub-anagram mode and the same letters open right up. These are the longest words our dictionary index currently returns for RETAINS:

In the tool itself the list continues down through the five and four letter finds, which is where most of the volume lives. The S gives nearly every shorter find a plural partner, and the ER and EST endings hiding in the rack keep whole families of words in play.

For Scrabble players the interesting detail is that every letter in RETAINS is a one-point tile, so the full rack has a base score of just 7 points. For this particular set the two sort orders agree, because score equals length for every result. The value of a rack like this is flexibility rather than raw tile value.

Strategy tips for better unscrambling

The solver gives you the answers, but a few habits make you faster with or without it.

• Strip the endings first. Set aside S, ED, ER or ING when you spot them, unscramble what remains, then reattach. Most long English words are a shorter word wearing a suffix.
• Pair vowels with consonants. English rarely stacks more than two vowels or two consonants together, so alternating them prunes bad arrangements quickly.
• Use the minimum length filter. When you only care about long answers, cutting the four letter noise makes the winners obvious.
• Match the mode to the puzzle. Perfect mode is for puzzles that demand every letter. For tile racks and letters rounds, sub-anagram mode with a sensible minimum length is faster.
• Sort by score when points matter. Remember the values are base tile values with no board multipliers and no bonus for using all seven tiles. For board-aware play with blank tiles, use the Scrabble word finder.
• Learn the high-frequency letter sets. The letters of RETAINS dominate shorter words too, and our five-letter words research shows the patterns worth memorising.
• Practise the manual method. Our anagram solving tips guide walks through the full technique step by step.

Related research

Go deeper into the data and technique behind this tool.

• Anagram solving tips, the manual techniques this solver automates.
• Five-letter words, the make-up of the most contested word length.
• Wordle letter frequency, which letters appear most and where.
• All word game research, the full data cluster.