Anagram Solver

An anagram is a full rearrangement: take every letter of a word, shuffle them, and land on a different word. Nothing added, nothing left over. Silent becomes listen because both words are set from the same six tiles — one E, one I, one L, one N, one S, one T — just composed in a different order.

The tidy way to say that is that two words are anagrams when they share the same multiset of letters. A multiset is a collection where repeats matter but order does not: the multiset for banana is three A’s, two N’s and one B, and any word that is an anagram of banana must carry exactly that inventory. This is stricter than merely using the same letters — stale and tassel draw from the same alphabet but are not anagrams, because the counts differ.

Not every rearrangement is a word, of course. Cat rearranges to act, but tac is not in the dictionary — of the six possible orderings of C, A and T, only two spell English words. That is why a solver earns its keep as the letters pile up: a seven-letter rack has 5,040 orderings, and checking them by hand is nobody’s idea of an evening.

Some letter sets are spectacularly productive. Feed this solver silent and it returns five exact anagrams from the word list: elints, enlist, inlets, listen and tinsel — six words sharing one set of letters once you count silent itself. Feed it least and you get nine: setal, slate, stale, steal, stela, taels, tales, teals and tesla (yes, lowercase tesla is an ordinary dictionary word — the unit of magnetic flux density). Even three letters can shine: ate, eat, eta, tae and tea are all rearrangements of one another.

Anagrams are one of the oldest devices in wordplay, and they are still load-bearing in modern puzzles. In cryptic crosswords, an anagram clue hides its answer in plain sight: the clue contains the exact letters of the answer (the fodder) alongside an indicator — a word that signals mixing, such as broken, cooked, confused, wild, at sea or in disarray. Experienced solvers count letters first: if a stretch of the clue has exactly as many letters as the answer needs and sits next to an indicator, an anagram is almost certainly on. The daily Jumble, syndicated in newspapers since 1954, is the same idea stripped bare — scrambled words, no disguise — and anagram rounds turn up everywhere from television letters games to pub quizzes and app word games.

Under the hood, no solver actually shuffles anything. The standard trick is the letter signature: sort a word’s letters alphabetically and you get a canonical key. Listen, silent and tinsel all sort to eilnst, so two words are anagrams exactly when their signatures match. This tool sorts your input once and compares that single key against every word of the same length — no permutations are ever generated, which is why the answer arrives in milliseconds even for fifteen letters. Competitive tile-game players internalize the same idea when they study alphagrams; the most celebrated seven-letter example is aeinrst, which nine words in this list share: anestri, antsier, nastier, ratines, retains, retinas, retsina, stainer and stearin.

The dictionary itself shows how common this crowding is. Among the 8,636 five-letter words in the list, 3,832 — not far off half — share their letter signature with at least one other word. The most crowded five-letter signature is aeprs, with twelve words on one set of letters: apers, apres, asper, pares, parse, pears, prase, presa, rapes, reaps, spare and spear. If a puzzle setter wants ambiguity, that is where they shop.

Exact mode — the default — answers the question wordplay actually asks: what else can these letters spell, using all of them? That is the definition cryptic crosswords, the Jumble and anagram rounds run on, and it is the right setting when you are checking whether a rearrangement you suspect really exists, or hunting a same-length answer whose letters you already hold.

Partial mode widens the search to every word of two letters or more that your letters can form — a measure of what a rack is worth rather than what a word conceals. It is the setting for find-all-words puzzles and for sizing up a handful of tiles. If tile games are the real goal, though — especially if you are holding blanks — the word unscrambler is the sharper tool: it accepts up to three wildcards and scores them honestly, with blank-covered letters worth zero. And if you would rather train the pattern-spotting muscle than outsource it, Quintle serves a fresh five-letter workout every day.

Every result on this page comes from the ENABLE word list, a public-domain lexicon of 168,548 words between 2 and 15 letters that many word games are built on. Matching is pure signature comparison — your letters are sorted into a canonical key and checked against each candidate word, so results are exhaustive within the list, and the relevant slice of the dictionary is only downloaded the first time you type. The point badges use the standard published letter values for each scoring system. Scrabble and Words With Friends are trademarks of their respective owners; we name them only to describe which point scale each toggle applies, and duplixo is not affiliated with or endorsed by either. ENABLE is not the official dictionary of any game, so treat a listed word as a strong candidate rather than a tournament ruling.