Word unscrambler

Which dictionary this is

The words here come from ENABLE — the Enhanced North American Benchmark Lexicon — 172,820 words, public domain, and the list a great many word games and puzzle sites are actually built on. It is downloaded from this site the moment you click into the letters field, and not before, so nobody who merely scrolls past this page pays for it. Every search after that runs in your browser against the copy your browser already has.

It is not a tournament dictionary, and it cannot be. The official lists — NWL in North America, Collins everywhere else — are copyrighted works owned by publishers, so they cannot appear on a page like this one in any form, at any price, in any language. That is the whole reason an answer here will sometimes disagree with what a tournament judge would accept, and it is worth knowing before you argue a word at a table rather than after.

It is also worth knowing that the official lists disagree with each other, so there was never one dictionary for this tool to have failed to be. Collins is the larger of the two and accepts thousands of words NWL does not; a word that is good in London is not automatically good in Boston, and the reverse happens as well. ENABLE sits close to both without being either — close enough that most of what you find here is playable anywhere, and far enough that the edges are worth reading about.

Why your word is not in it

A tool that hands back a list of words is only as useful as your sense of where its list stops. Five things account for almost every word a reader expects to see here and does not, and none of them is a bug.

• It is newer than the list. ENABLE was assembled in the 1990s and has not been revised since, so email, blog, internet, podcast and emoji are all missing — every one of them a perfectly ordinary English word today.
• It reached the tournament lists after ENABLE was frozen. qi and za are the two famous examples: both have been legal in tournament play for years, both are the standard way to unload a q or a z, and neither is here.
• It is a Collins word. ee, oi, io, ea and zo are accepted in Collins play and are not in ENABLE at all, which is the single largest source of disagreement between this tool and a game played outside North America.
• It is a proper noun. Names of people, places, brands and days are absent by design rather than by omission, and the reason is the same one every word list gives: there is no end to them.
• It is one letter, a phrase, a hyphenated form or an abbreviation. The shortest word here is two letters long, and nothing with a space, a hyphen or a full stop in it is in the list.

The disagreement runs the other way too: ENABLE holds words your particular game will refuse, and this tool has no way of telling you which. That is not a gap to be filled by a better tool — it is what happens when the reference you can legally use is not the reference your game uses. Treat what you find here as a strong suggestion to be checked against whatever your game accepts, which is precisely what a paper dictionary at the side of the table has always been.

The two-letter words everyone forgets

Two-letter words are the single highest-value thing to memorise in any tile game, and it is not close. They are what lets you play alongside a word already on the board instead of through it, so one tile can score in two directions at once; they are how an unplayable rack becomes a playable one; and they are the difference between passing your turn and taking eight points for a letter you were stuck with. There are 96 of them in this dictionary, and here they all are.

aa ab ad ae ag ah ai al am an ar as
at aw ax ay ba be bi bo by de do ed
ef eh el em en er es et ex fa go ha
he hi hm ho id if in is it jo ka la
li lo ma me mi mm mo mu my na ne no
nu od oe of oh om on op or os ow ox
oy pa pe pi re sh si so ta ti to uh
um un up us ut we wo xi xu ya ye yo

• The four that carry an expensive tile are the ones to learn first: jo, ka, xi and xu turn the letters nobody wants into a score rather than a dead turn.
• The all-vowel words rescue the rack everyone dreads: aa, ae, ai and oe let you shed vowels two at a time when you have drawn five of them.
• A surprising number are simply noises somebody wrote down, and they are legal all the same: hm, mm, sh, uh, um, ow, oy, ha and ho.
• The rest are the ones that look like typing errors and are not: od, os, ut, wo, ya and ye are all real entries, and doubting them costs more turns than playing them.

That is ENABLE’s 96, not the world’s. Collins accepts a good many more, and the North American list has since added a few this one has never held — ok and ew among them. If you are playing seriously, learn your own game’s list; if you are playing at a kitchen table, these 96 will serve you for years.

Hooks and suffixes: the word already on the board

The strongest play on a board is very often not a new word at all. It is a word somebody else has already placed, made longer by one letter or three, which scores the whole of the old word again and reaches a premium square the original never touched. A player who sees only new words is playing a much smaller game than the board is offering.

• The plural or the verb ending is the one everybody sees, and it is still the one that wins turns: host becomes hosts, cat becomes cats, and a single tile has scored an entire word twice over.
• Tense and participle endings extend almost any verb already sitting there: play becomes played and playing, host becomes hosted.
• The agent and comparative endings are worth more because they are longer: play becomes player and players, and friendly becomes friendlier.
• A front hook is the same trick from the other end and is far easier to miss, because you read a board left to right: host becomes ghost with a single g, and our becomes hour with a single h.
• Prefixes are the long version of a front hook: play becomes replay, friend becomes befriend, and each of them lengthens a word without needing a single new place on the board.

This tool searches hooks perfectly well, and the trick to it is not obvious: type the letters of the word already on the board together with the letters on your rack, then read the longer groups rather than the short ones. Give it host plus your own l, e and r and hostler comes back in the seven-letter group, which is exactly the question you were asking the board.

What it cannot do is tell you whether the result fits. This is a tool about combination, not about position: it knows every word your letters can build and nothing whatever about where the squares are, which letters are already fixed, or what your extension would spell in the other direction. Read its answer as a shortlist and let the board eliminate.

When a wildcard is worth more than a letter

Type ? among your letters and it stands for any one letter. Each one counts as one of your letters — abc?? is five letters and can build a five-letter word, not a seven-letter one — and every word found with a wildcard is marked to show which letter it supplied, because that is the only way to tell the answers that cost you a blank from the answers that did not.

• It earns its keep when it completes a full-rack word. In most tile games using all seven at once carries a large bonus, and that bonus is far bigger than anything a single lettered tile would ever have scored.
• It earns its keep when it supplies the letter you were never going to draw — the s that turns four words into eight, or the one vowel a rack of six consonants is missing.
• It does not earn its keep on a short word you could have made anyway. Spending a blank for five points is the most common way good players lose a game slowly, and the marking on each result exists so you can see when you are about to do it.

Two wildcards is the ceiling, and the reason is a fact about the games rather than a limit of the search: they deal two blanks and no more. The search itself would not notice a third — it asks each word how many letters your letters cannot supply and compares that against however many wildcards you have, so any allowance at all costs exactly the same single pass over the dictionary. What would justify raising the number is a game people actually play with three, and nothing else would.

A third ? is refused and said out loud rather than quietly ignored, and so is a sixteenth letter. Dropping the extra character and answering anyway would mean answering a question you did not ask, and you would have no way of noticing. Delete it and the search runs again immediately; the rest of your letters were never in doubt.

Reading the answer

Results arrive grouped by word length with the longest group first, and alphabetically within each group. Longest first is the order the question was asked in: almost nobody types seven letters hoping for a two-letter word. The shorter groups are still there underneath, because a play that fits the space on the board beats a longer one that does not.

Each group heading carries the true number of matches at that length, and that number stays true even when the list beneath it has been cut short at fifty. Twelve common letters can match several thousand words, and a page that tried to draw all of them would simply stop responding — so a heading reading 412 above a list of 50 is the honest answer rather than a rounding of it. Expanding the group fetches the rest; nothing is hidden permanently, and nothing truncated is ever presented as complete.

Fifteen letters is the ceiling on the input, and it is not there for speed — searching is the same single pass over the dictionary whether you typed five letters or fifty. It is there because past the width of any word game’s rack the question stops being a question, and an over-long input is nearly always a paste that landed in the wrong field. Anything that is neither a letter nor a ? is ignored, so letters copied out of a newspaper with their punctuation attached still ask what you meant, and case never matters.

One more thing is worth knowing, because this is the only tool on this site that talks to the network at all. The dictionary is a download, so it can fail, and a failed download must never reach you as an empty result — the page says loading, says it failed and offers to try again, and says nothing about your letters in either case. Before you have typed anything it shows a worked example with real results already in the page, so you can see what an answer looks like without waiting for anything.