Anagram Solver & Word Unscrambler
Unscramble letters to find every word you can make, with sub-anagrams and length filters for word games and puzzles.
Almost every arrangement of the letters is not a word
The number of ways to arrange n letters is n factorial, divided by the factorials of any repeats. That grows extremely fast. The number of those arrangements that happen to be English words does not grow at all — measured against the 274,937-word dictionary this tool searches:
| Letters | Arrangements | Real words | Hit rate | Which are |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| eat | 6 | 5 | 83% | ate, eat, eta, tae |
| stop | 24 | 6 | 25% | opts, post, pots, spot |
| least | 120 | 12 | 10% | least, leats, salet, setal |
| listen | 720 | 7 | 0.972% | elints, enlist, inlets, intels |
| trances | 5,040 | 7 | 0.139% | canters, carnets, nectars, recants |
| alerting | 40,320 | 7 | 0.017% | alerting, altering, integral, relating |
Three letters and the space is more than three-quarters full. Eight letters and it is 0.017% — seven words hiding among forty thousand arrangements. An anagram solver is not filtering a list; it is searching a space that is essentially empty.
Which is why solvers do not generate arrangements
The obvious method — produce every arrangement and check each against a dictionary — is hopeless almost immediately:
| Word length | Arrangements to check |
|---|---|
| 3 letters | 6 |
| 5 letters | 120 |
| 8 letters | 40,320 |
| 10 letters | 3,628,800 |
| 12 letters | 479,001,600 |
The method that works turns the problem inside out. Two words are anagrams exactly when their letters, sorted, are identical — so sort the letters of every dictionary word once, group by the result, and every query becomes a single lookup. Building that index over 274,937 words takes one pass. After that, finding the anagrams of a twelve-letter word costs precisely what finding the anagrams of a three-letter word costs, because it is the same map access.
That is a general shape worth recognising: when the search space is enormous and the answers are sparse, do not search it. Find a key that the answers share, and index by that instead.
Most words have no anagram at all
Grouping the whole dictionary that way is also the easiest way to see how rare anagrams are. 274,937 words reduce to 244,419 distinct letter-signatures. Only 9% of those groups hold more than one word, and only 19.1% of words have any anagram whatsoever. Four words in five are alone in their arrangement.
The big families cluster where you would expect — short words built from the commonest letters. The largest has 13 members, all rearrangements of the same five letters:
apers, apres, asper, pares, parse, pears, prase, presa, rapes, reaps, spaer, spare, spear
Which points at something about word games generally. The letters that give you the most options are the common ones — a, e, r, s, t — and a rack full of rare letters is not merely harder to score with, it has fewer arrangements that are words at all.
How to use
- Enter your letters.
- Filter by length or starting letter.
- Browse the words found.
- Check which dictionary your game actually uses.
Frequently asked questions
How does anagram solving work?
By sorting each word's letters into a canonical form and grouping words that share one. Every anagram of a word produces the same sorted key, so finding them becomes a lookup rather than a search through permutations — which matters, since ten letters have over three million arrangements.
What is a sub-anagram?
A word using some but not all of your letters. Most word games score by length, so knowing the longest sub-anagram is usually more useful than knowing whether a full anagram exists — full anagrams of a random letter set are rare.
Why does my game not accept a word found here?
Because word games use specific word lists, and they differ. Competitive Scrabble uses different lists in North America and the rest of the world, and casual apps use their own. A word that is unquestionably English may still not be in the list your game checks against.
Are proper nouns included?
Generally not, following the convention of most word games, which exclude names, places and brands. Some puzzle types deliberately use them, in which case a general word list will not help.
Is using a solver cheating?
In a competitive game, plainly yes. For solo puzzles, crossword construction, learning which letter combinations are playable, or checking after the fact, it is a study aid. Many competitive players use solvers extensively in training and never during play.
What makes a good anagram of a phrase?
That the result comments on the original. Rearranging letters is mechanical; producing something apt is not, and the well-known examples are memorable because the anagram says something about its source rather than merely reusing its letters.
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