Anagram Solver & Generator

What the anagram solver does

The Anagram Solver takes the letters you type and lists every English word that uses all of them, then every shorter word they can make. It can also turn a name or phrase into anagrams of two or three real words, and check whether two words are anagrams of each other. It searches about 179,000 words and runs in your browser.

An anagram is a word or phrase made by rearranging all the letters of another, using each letter exactly once: listen becomes silent.

How to solve an anagram

1. Open the Solve tab and type your letters or a word, up to 15 letters. Capitals and spaces don’t matter.
2. The box at the top shows the exact anagrams: the words that use every letter. Below it, the shorter words are grouped by length, longest first.
3. Tap a word to see what it means or to copy it. “Copy list” copies all the exact anagrams at once.
4. Missing a letter? Type ? for a blank that can stand for any letter. Tick Common words only to hide the rarer dictionary words.

Worked example: for listen, the solver finds 5 exact anagrams (enlist, inlets, silent, tinsel, elints) and 88 shorter words, such as inlet, lines, tiles. With a blank, liste? matches 19 common six-letter words, including listed, itself, titles, stifle.

Anagram generator for names and phrases

A full name rarely rearranges into one word, so the Names & phrases tab works as an anagram generator: it splits the letters into one, two or three real words. Type a name or a short phrase of up to 30 letters. Anagrams made of everyday words come first, and each list shows the best 300 at most.

• Keep a word. A long name or phrase can have a great many anagrams: the Morse code has 416 three-word ones from common words alone. Tap a result and choose a word to keep, or type one in the box, and the search continues with the letters that are left. Keeping dots leaves 2 ways to finish with two more words, such as come + here and mere + echo.
• Choose the number of words. Two-word anagrams read more naturally; three words find far more.
• Rare words too widens the search to the less common words in the list. It helps with short names that otherwise find nothing.
• Swap a word. Tap a result to see other words made of the same letters, so dirty room can be read with moor instead.

The words come out longest first, not in sentence order, so put them in the order that reads best. Results for names leave out rude and unkind words.

Well-known phrase anagrams

These classics are all found by the Names & phrases tab. Type the left side to see them among the results.

Anagrams of common words

What the Solve tab returns for words people often look up (common words only):

Check whether two words are anagrams

The Compare two tab answers a yes-or-no question: do these two words or phrases use exactly the same letters? Spaces, capitals, punctuation and accents are ignored. Dormitory and dirty room pass: both have the same 9 letters. Listen and silence fail, and the tool shows why: the first has a T the second lacks, and the second has C and E. That makes it handy for checking an anagram you wrote yourself.

Tips for solving anagrams by hand

• Pull out common endings. Set aside -ING, -ED, -ER, -EST, -TION or -S and see what the remaining letters spell.
• Pair the consonants. Look for CH, SH, TH, ST, TR and CK. English words are built from these blocks.
• Write the letters in a circle. It breaks the order of the original word, which is what keeps you from seeing the new one.
• Start with the rare letter. A J, Q, X or Z can only sit in a few places, and Q almost always needs its U.
• In cryptic crosswords, words such as “mixed”, “broken” or “confused” signal an anagram, and the answer has the same number of letters as the words being mixed.

Which words does it use?

The word list combines the public-domain ENABLE list with the SCOWL English word lists: about 179,000 words of 2 to 15 letters, including plurals and verb forms, with profanity and slurs removed. About 40,000 of them are marked as common and shown in darker text. Definitions come from WordNet (Princeton University) and our own dictionary. Names of people and places are not in the list, so a name is treated as a set of letters.

Everything runs in your browser. The letters, names and phrases you type are never sent anywhere or stored.

For word-game racks, the Word Unscrambler adds letter points and starts-with, ends-with and contains filters. You can also find rhymes with the Rhyming Words finder, blend two words in the Word Combiner, build a puzzle with the Word Search Maker, or play Hangman.