Solvers & tools
Anagram Solver
An anagram solver with a strict definition of the job: words that use every letter you enter, exactly as often as you entered it, checked against all 173,310 words in the public-domain list this whole site searches. Near misses one letter short get their own section.
Written by Blake Boege
What this searches, and how
A word qualifies as a perfect anagram when its letters are your letters: the same multiset, nothing missing and nothing spare. The solver walks the full dictionary at your exact length, keeps the words your rack can assemble, and shows all of them, alphabetically. There is no ranking to argue with because at full length there is nothing to rank: every answer used everything.
The one-letter-down section exists because that is what a stuck player reaches for next. When your seven letters make no seven-letter word, the useful answer is not a shrug, it is the six-letter words that spend all but one.
A worked example
LISTEN has six perfect anagrams in the list, itself included: ELINTS, ENLIST, INLETS, LISTEN, SILENT and TINSEL. That is unusually rich for six letters, and it is why the word turns up in every book about wordplay ever printed.
The famous rack AEINRST does even better: nine seven-letter anagrams, NASTIER and RETAINS and RETSINA among them, which is why tile players memorise it. The same seven letters hold 257 words in this list once the shorter lengths are counted, but only the nine that spend everything are anagrams of the rack. That distinction is the whole difference between this page and the word finder.
Common questions
- What makes an anagram perfect?
- It uses every letter you entered, exactly as often as you entered it. LISTEN and SILENT are perfect anagrams of each other: same six letters, same counts, different order. TINSEL qualifies too. TIN does not, because thirteen letters of leftovers is a different question, and that question belongs to the word finder.
- Why does my puzzle app accept a word this page rejects?
- Different word lists. This site searches one public-domain list from end to end, the same one on every page, so a word is either in it or it is not. Commercial apps license different dictionaries, and the differences cluster exactly where anagram players spend their time: the obscure short words.
- Can it solve multi-word anagrams?
- No. Everything here is a single dictionary word. Splitting DORMITORY into DIRTY ROOM is a different computation with a much bigger answer space, and most of that space is nonsense pairs. A tool that returns ten thousand phrase splits has answered nothing.
- Does it take blanks or wildcards?
- Not on this page, on purpose: a blank makes the phrase 'uses every letter' ambiguous. The word finder on the homepage takes up to three blanks, written as ? marks, and searches the same list with them.