Word unscrambler

Enter your letters in any order, as many as a long word needs. The tool checks every word in its list against them and keeps each one you could lay with those tiles, using each tile once. A letter typed twice can be used twice; a letter typed once cannot. Results are grouped by length, from the longest down to two letters. Within each group the highest scoring words come first, so the move worth most is at the top. A question mark stands for a blank tile, which can be any letter. Letters that the blank has to supply are underlined in each result, and they score nothing. Tick the anagram option and the list narrows to words that take every tile.

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 that option ticked, only words that use the whole set appear. That suits jumbled-word puzzles and the nine letters of the Countdown letters round, where the longest word wins. 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.

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. UK tournaments are judged against Collins Scrabble Words, known earlier as SOWPODS, while North American clubs use their own list. Those lists are copyrighted and cannot be republished, so a word shown here may be missing from Collins, and a few Collins 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. For Wordle-style puzzles, the Wordle helper works from coloured tiles instead of a rack.