Anagram solver

They sound like the same thing and are not, and the difference decides which of these two tools you want.

An anagram uses every letter, exactly once. LISTEN and SILENT are anagrams: six letters in, six letters out, nothing spare. So are EARTH and HEART. Two words are anagrams when their letters sort to the same sequence — LISTEN and SILENT both sort to EILNST, and that shared sequence is all an anagram really is.

To unscramble is looser: rearrange letters to form words using some of what you have, not necessarily all of it. The same six letters of LISTEN give 5 anagrams — ELINTS, ENLIST, INLETS, SILENT, TINSEL — and another 84 words besides, every one of which leaves a letter behind.

Two worked examples

STOP. Four letters, and 5 other words use all four — OPTS, POST, POTS, SPOT, TOPS. Unscramble the same four instead and you get 16 words in total: those 5, the word itself, and 10 shorter ones that each leave a letter behind.

FASHION. Seven letters, and in our dictionary nothing else uses all seven — so the anagram solver comes back empty, while the unscrambler finds 82 shorter words in the same letters. An empty result here is information rather than a failure: it means those exact letters spell one word and one word only. Most words are like this: of the 86 letter sets on this site, 61 have no true anagram at all.

Phrases, and what we do not do

This solver works on single words. The classic party anagrams split letters across several words — DORMITORY into DIRTY ROOM — and we do not do that yet. It is a genuinely harder problem: the letters have to be partitioned between words as well as rearranged within them, and the number of ways to try grows fast enough to need real limits on it.

We would rather say so than return a short list and let you assume it was the whole one. Until it exists, the unscrambler is the closer tool for phrases — it will at least show you every word hiding in your letters, which is how most multi-word anagrams get found by hand anyway.