Anagram Solver
True anagrams — every letter used
Unlike the unscrambler, this tool only returns words that use all of your letters exactly once. Add ? for a wildcard letter.
What makes an anagram different from an unscramble
An anagram uses every letter you give it, exactly once. LISTEN and SILENT are anagrams of each other because both spend all six letters. An unscrambler is looser: it will happily hand back LIST, TEN and LINE from the same six letters, because it is looking for anything buildable from a subset.
That distinction matters when you are solving a puzzle that promises a single answer. Cryptic crossword clues, riddle chains and name games are usually built on true anagrams, so a list that includes shorter words is mostly noise. This tool filters that noise out by requiring the full letter count.
Using wildcards
Type ? for a letter you do not know yet. Each wildcard matches any single letter, so LIS?EN returns words of exactly six letters where the fourth position is free. Wildcards are how you handle a blank tile, a smudged letter in a printed puzzle, or a clue where one character is genuinely missing.
Adding more than two wildcards to a short word tends to return an unhelpful pile of matches, since the constraint stops being much of a constraint. On seven letters or more, two or three wildcards still narrow things usefully.
When there is no answer
Some letter sets have no true anagram, and that is real information rather than a failure. If the puzzle insists there is one, the usual causes are a misread letter, a proper noun that no dictionary lists, or a phrase rather than a single word. Try the unscrambler on the same letters — if it returns long words that use nearly all of them, you probably have one letter wrong.
Frequently asked questions
Does an anagram have to use every letter?
Yes. That is the definition, and it is what separates an anagram from an unscramble. If a shorter word would satisfy you, use the unscrambler instead — it searches every subset of your letters rather than only the full set.
Can an anagram be more than one word?
In puzzles, often yes, and that is where this tool stops. It matches single dictionary words. If a clue resolves to a two-word phrase, no single-word solver will find it, and the usual approach is to look for a plausible long word first and then anagram whatever letters remain.
Are proper nouns included?
No. The dictionary here holds common English words, so names of people, places and brands are excluded. Many published anagram puzzles do use names, which is a common reason a puzzle answer will not appear here.
Does letter case or spacing matter?
No. Case is ignored, and spaces and punctuation are stripped before solving, so you can paste a clue exactly as it is printed. Only the letters themselves count.
Why do some results look like words I have never seen?
Word game dictionaries carry a long tail of valid but rarely spoken words, which is exactly why they are useful in Scrabble and crosswords. If a result looks implausible for your puzzle, check whether the puzzle uses a restricted word list before discarding it.