Anagram solver
Enter your letters and get the words that use every one of them. This is the strict version of the unscrambler: nothing is left over, nothing is added.
An anagram uses every letter, which is a different question
The word finder on the homepage answers "what can I make from some of these letters". An anagram solver answers "what uses all of them", and the two produce very different lists. Six letters typically make dozens of shorter words and either one anagram or none at all. That is not a failure of the tool — most letter combinations simply are not a word in any order.
Mechanically it is the easier question. Sort your letters, look the signature up once, and either something is there or nothing is: EILNST returns ENLIST, LISTEN, SILENT and TINSEL together, because an index built on sorted letters puts all anagrams of a word in the same place. There is no searching involved at all.
When there is no exact anagram, the tool falls back to the longest words it can make from a subset, so the page still answers something useful rather than showing an empty box. Those results are marked by their length: if you asked for seven letters and the best answer is six, one letter went unused.
Blanks, names and the limits of a word list
A ? in an anagram is a wildcard letter, which usually turns "no anagram" into several. It is the fastest way to check whether a set of letters is one letter away from working — useful for puzzle clues where a letter is obscured, and for a rack where you are holding an actual blank tile.
Two things this cannot do. It will not produce multi-word anagrams, so a phrase that rearranges into two words is out of scope: that is a much larger search and a different tool. And it will not produce proper nouns, because ENABLE contains none — no names, no places, no brands. If you are anagramming somebody's name, no dictionary-based solver will help you.
Everything else is a straightforward consequence of the list: if a word is not in it, no arrangement of your letters will find it. The list is public domain and its contents are stated plainly, which is more than most anagram sites will tell you.
The busiest anagram sets in the list
Every word in a row uses exactly the same letters. These were found by grouping the whole list by its sorted-letters signature — the same index the solver uses — rather than picked out by hand, so they are the real answer to "which letters rearrange the most ways".
| Letters | Words | The set |
|---|---|---|
AEPRS | 12 | APERS, APRES, ASPER, PARES, PARSE, PEARS, PRASE, PRESA, RAPES, REAPS, SPARE, SPEAR |
AELST | 10 | LEAST, SETAL, SLATE, STALE, STEAL, STELA, TAELS, TALES, TEALS, TESLA |
AELRS | 8 | ARLES, EARLS, LARES, LASER, LEARS, RALES, REALS, SERAL |
AELPS | 8 | LAPSE, LEAPS, PALES, PEALS, PLEAS, SALEP, SEPAL, SPALE |
EIPRS | 8 | PERIS, PIERS, PRIES, PRISE, RIPES, SPEIR, SPIER, SPIRE |
ABEST | 7 | ABETS, BASTE, BATES, BEAST, BEATS, BETAS, TABES |
ACERS | 7 | ACRES, CARES, CARSE, ESCAR, RACES, SCARE, SERAC |
AEMNS | 7 | AMENS, MANES, MANSE, MEANS, MENSA, NAMES, NEMAS |
Common questions
What is the difference between an anagram solver and a word unscrambler?
An anagram uses every letter you entered. An unscrambler will use any subset of them, so it returns far more words. This page does the strict version; the homepage does the loose one.
Why does my word have no anagram?
Most letter combinations do not rearrange into another word — the number of possible arrangements is enormous and the number of real words is not. Adding a blank with ? is the quickest way to see whether you are one letter away.
Can it solve anagrams of names or phrases?
No. The word list contains no proper nouns at all, and the solver produces single words only, so multi-word phrase anagrams are outside what it does.