Word unscrambler

LISTEN makes 119 words of 2 letters or more, counted in the list of 270,652 English words this page uses. Of those, 7 use all 6 letters, such as SILENT and TINSEL. To make words from the letters, the search tests every word in the list against them, each letter used once, and keeps the ones that fit.

Each extra letter widens the list quickly. PLAYERS has 7 different letters, which can be arranged into 13,692 strings of 2 to 7 letters, yet only 266 of them are words in the list. The same count answers the classroom puzzle of how many words hide inside one longer word.

A letter typed twice can be used twice; a letter typed once cannot, unless Letters can repeat is ticked. Letters that a blank has to supply are underlined in each result and score nothing, just as a blank tile does on the board. The list runs down to two letters, the shortest words a board game accepts.

A blank tile, or wildcard, turns a rack from awkward to playable, and the search takes any mix of letters and blanks. Two blanks multiply the results sharply, since each can become any of 26 letters. An asterisk works as a blank too.

Because a blank scores zero, the same word can be worth different amounts depending on which letters the blank covers. The tool always lets your real tiles take the letters and gives the blank only what is missing, and the score shown already deducts the blank's letter.

An anagram rearranges all the letters of one word or phrase into another, as LISTEN becomes SILENT. With Use every letter ticked, only words that use the whole set appear, which also shows what a jumbled word spells. That suits jumbled-word puzzles and the nine letters of the Countdown letters round, where the longest word wins; the daily word scramble offers ten such words against the clock.

Leave it unticked for a rack game such as Scrabble or Words With Friends, where shorter words that fit a gap on the board often score better.

Pattern mode takes the letters you know in their positions and a question mark, full stop or underscore for each empty square. C?T finds CAT, COT and CUT; ??A?E finds every five-letter word with A third and E fifth. The pattern sets the length exactly, so count the squares in the grid first. The filters below the pattern still apply, which helps when a crossword clue hints at an ending such as ING.

Five filters narrow either search, and any of them can be combined with the others.

• Starts with keeps words that begin with the letters you give, useful for building a prefix such as UN or RE onto the board.
• Ends with does the same for suffixes such as NESS, TION or ED.
• Contains keeps words with that run of letters together anywhere, such as QU.
• Leave out removes words that contain any of the letters listed.
• Minimum and maximum length trim the letter search to the space you have.

Most moves in Scrabble build on letters already on the board, and the finder treats them as extra tiles. Type your rack, then add the board letters you want to play through. The list shows every word the combined set makes. The Contains filter then keeps only the words that hold that board letter, or a run such as QU, somewhere inside them.

Lengthening a word already played works the same way. Type that word's letters together with your rack and set Starts with or Ends with to the word itself. With PLAY on the board and E, R and D on the rack, Starts with PLAY lists PLAYED and PLAYER among the results.

The score beside each result counts the face value of every letter in the word, the board letters included, and adds no premium squares. It ranks the options against each other rather than giving the points a move will earn on the board.

Scores use the letter values of the English Scrabble set, the same in Britain and the United States (Hasbro rules). The set has 100 tiles including two blanks, and playing all seven tiles from your rack in one turn earns a 50-point bonus on top. The scores here are the face value of the letters only. Premium squares on the board, such as double and triple word scores, depend on where you play and are not added.

The words come from an open word list made for word games, with British and American spellings side by side (Letterpress word list). It includes plurals and verb forms and leaves out proper nouns, abbreviations and words with hyphens or apostrophes. Every count on this page comes from that list of 270,652 words.

NASPA names its NASPA Word List the official reference for Scrabble in the United States and Canada, and Scrabble Australia names Collins Scrabble Words, known earlier as SOWPODS, the official list in Australia and most of the English-speaking world. Both are licensed lists that this page does not ship, so a word shown here may be missing from them, and a few of their words may be missing here.

The official rules are clear that no dictionary or word guide may be used while a game is in progress (Mattel rules). The finder is best for checking a word before a challenge in a friendly game, or for studying afterwards which moves you missed. It also teaches the short words that open up a crowded board, and the word grid game is a fair way to practise spotting them. For Wordle-style puzzles, the Wordle helper works from coloured tiles instead of a rack.