Word Unscrambler

Type the letters you have. The tool returns every dictionary word that can be built from them, longest first — the same order a word game scores them.

What "unscramble" means here

You give a multiset of letters — each letter as many times as you hold it — and the tool returns every dictionary word that can be spelled without using a letter more often than you have it. It is not limited to using every letter: a seven-letter rack also produces six-, five-, four-, three- and two-letter words, because in most word games those are worth playing.

Two rules decide what comes back:

  1. Letter counts, not just letter presence. LISTEN has one E. "SLEEP" needs two, so it is excluded even though every letter in it appears in the rack.
  2. Dictionary membership. A word has to be in the 152,405-entry list. Names, abbreviations written with capitals and multi-word phrases are not in it.

Worked example: LISTEN

Six letters, 90 valid words. Here are the first thirty, longest first:

Three letters, TCA, gives four words: act, cat, at, ta. Both two-letter words are in the dictionary; ta is British informal usage, which is why it appears in a word-game list and not in most dictionaries of American English.

How the results are ordered

Longest first, then alphabetically. That order is deliberate: in Scrabble and Words With Friends the long word usually scores more, and in a word puzzle the longest match is usually the answer. If you want the opposite — the shortest word that uses the awkward letters — set Shortest word and add a starting letter.

Narrowing a large result

A rack of eight common letters can produce several hundred words. Three filters cut it down fast:

What the dictionary does not contain

Questions

Why is a word I know missing from the results?

Usually one of three reasons: it is not in the dictionary, it needs a letter twice and your rack has that letter once, or it is longer than 12 letters. Check the letter counts first — that is the most common cause.

Does the order of the letters I type matter?

No. The tool counts letters, so listen, silent and tnelis all return the same list.

Can I search for words that start and end with the same letter?

Not with a single field. Put the letter in both Starts with and Ends with; a two-letter word such as aa also matches, so raise Shortest word if you want longer answers.

Is the word list sent to my browser in full?

Yes — about 1.4 MB of text, 391 KB compressed, downloaded once per visit and cached by the browser. That is why the first search takes a moment and later ones are instant. Nothing you type is sent to the server.

All word tools

Every page on this site. All five solvers read the same 152,405-word dictionary, so a word that is missing from one is missing from all of them.

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