What it does
Type in the letters you have — from a rack of tiles, a puzzle, or just a jumble — and this tool lists every word in its dictionary that you can spell with them. It is built for word games like Scrabble, Words With Friends and anagram puzzles, where you can see the letters but not the words hiding in them.
How it works
The clever part is an old trick: two words are anagrams of each other exactly when their letters, sorted into alphabetical order, are identical. "Listen" and "silent" both sort to eilnst. So every word in the dictionary is stored alongside its sorted-letters "fingerprint", and that fingerprint column is indexed.
To find the words you can make, the tool sorts your letters, then looks up not just that exact fingerprint but the fingerprint of every smaller combination of your letters too — so you get full-length anagrams and all the shorter words. Because the lookup is an indexed match rather than a scan through hundreds of thousands of words, it returns in a few milliseconds.
For more on how that fingerprint trick turns into a working search over hundreds of thousands of words, see our guide to how word unscramblers work.
Worked example
Give it the letters listen and, among others, it finds: enlist, inlets, listen, silent, slinte, tinsel — the six letters rearrange into several complete words, plus many shorter ones.
Fewer letters still turn up plenty of words: trace gives caret, carte, cater, cerat, crate, creat — the full five-letter anagrams first, then the shorter words hiding inside the same letters.
Edge cases and limitations
- No wildcards or blank tiles. Every letter you enter must be one you actually have — there's no way to mark an unknown letter or a Scrabble blank. If you know a word's length and some fixed letters but have gaps, the crossword solver is the right tool instead: it accepts
?or_as a wildcard for each unknown position. - Only the first 12 letters count. The field accepts up to 15 characters, but the lookup only considers the first 12 — beyond that, the number of possible letter sub-combinations grows too fast to check instantly.
- Words shorter than three letters are hidden by default. Two-letter words such as "at" or "in" exist in the dictionary but are left out of the results, keeping the list focused on the words most worth playing.
- Proper nouns never appear. Names, places and brands are excluded from the dictionary by design, matching the rules of Scrabble and most word games, which don't allow capitalised words.
Common uses
- Scrabble and Words With Friends: find the highest-scoring word your rack allows.
- Anagram and crossword puzzles: unjumble a clue or fill a tricky gap.
- Learning and teaching: explore the words a set of letters can build.
Frequently asked
Does it only show full anagrams?
No. It shows full-length anagrams and every shorter word you can make from a subset of your letters, grouped by length so the longest are easy to spot.
Are these all valid in Scrabble?
The dictionary is a large general word list, so it is broader than any single game's official list. Treat unusual results with a little caution if you are playing competitively.
Is my input sent anywhere?
Your letters are looked up on our server (that is where the dictionary lives), but they are not stored, and nothing else about your query is kept.
Can I search using wildcards for unknown letters?
Not on this tool — every letter you type must be one you actually have. Use the crossword solver if you know a word's length and some fixed letters but have gaps.
Why don't longer racks work past 12 letters?
The lookup only considers the first 12 letters you enter. Checking every possible sub-combination of a longer set grows too fast to return instantly, so extra letters beyond the twelfth are ignored.
Why is a word I know is valid missing from the results?
The two most common reasons: the word is shorter than three letters, which are hidden by default, or it's a proper noun, which the dictionary excludes entirely. A very small number of otherwise-valid words are also withheld under a profanity filter.