Unscramble

What is an anagram?

An anagram is a word or phrase made by rearranging the letters of another word or phrase, using every letter exactly once. The new arrangement must also be a real word or phrase. Listen and silent are anagrams of each other: both use the letters E, I, L, N, S and T, once each.

Examples

  • listen, silent, enlist, tinsel and inlets all share the same six letters.
  • evil, vile, live and veil are four anagrams of one another.
  • stressed and desserts use the same eight letters.
  • the eyes and they see are an example of a phrase anagram, where spaces do not count as letters.

Anagram, unscramble and permutation

These words are close, but they are not the same.

  • An anagram uses all of the letters, so the new word has the same length.
  • To unscramble usually means finding any word hidden in a set of letters. Most word games let you use some of your tiles, not all of them, so unscrambling covers shorter words too. That is why the word unscrambler lists words of every length, while the anagram solver lists only words that use every letter.
  • A permutation is any ordering of the letters, whether or not it makes a word. Most permutations are nonsense.

How many arrangements are there?

For a word with no repeated letters, the number of orderings is the factorial of its length. Four distinct letters can be ordered in 24 ways (4 x 3 x 2 x 1). Ten distinct letters can be ordered in 3,628,800 ways. When letters repeat, divide by the factorial of each repeated count, which is why a word like letter has fewer distinct orderings than six different letters would. Only a tiny share of those orderings are real words, which is why a computer checks a dictionary rather than trying every ordering by eye.

Anagrams in puzzles and writing

Cryptic crosswords use anagrams constantly. The clue contains the letters to rearrange plus an anagram indicator, a word that signals disorder, such as mixed, broken, confused, wild or out. Spotting those indicator words is half the battle. Writers also use anagrams for pen names, character names and hidden messages.

Finding anagrams

Type your letters into the anagram solver. It lists every word in its dictionary that uses all of them. Add a ? for a letter you are unsure of and it will try every possibility.