Permutations
Every arrangement of your letters
Up to eight letters. Real dictionary words are highlighted in amber so you can spot valid plays among the noise.
Every arrangement, not only the real words
A permutation is any ordering of your letters, whether or not it spells something. Three distinct letters give six permutations, four give twenty-four, five give a hundred and twenty. The count is the factorial of the letter count, which is why the list explodes as you add letters.
This is the raw version of what the other tools do. The unscrambler generates arrangements and then keeps the ones a dictionary recognises; this shows you the arrangements themselves.
When repeated letters change the count
Repeats reduce the total, because swapping two identical letters produces the same string. The word LETTER has six letters, so six factorial is seven hundred and twenty, but the two Ts and two Es are interchangeable, which divides the count by two twice and leaves a hundred and eighty distinct arrangements.
That is why a word full of repeats feels easier to unscramble than its length suggests: there are genuinely fewer possibilities to consider.
What this is useful for
Puzzle construction, teaching combinatorics, and checking that a scramble you generated is genuinely different from the original. It is also the honest answer when someone asks how many ways a set of letters can be arranged — a question that comes up in probability homework far more often than in word games.
Frequently asked questions
How many permutations will I get?
The factorial of the number of letters, divided by the factorial of each repeated letter's count. Six distinct letters give seven hundred and twenty; six letters with one pair repeated give three hundred and sixty.
Why is the list so long?
Factorials grow brutally fast. Eight letters already give over forty thousand arrangements, and ten give more than three and a half million. Beyond about eight letters, a permutation list stops being something a person can read.
Are these real words?
Almost none of them. Permutations ignore the dictionary entirely. If you want only valid words, the unscrambler is the tool — it filters this list down to what English recognises.
Does it include shorter arrangements?
No. A permutation uses every letter you enter. Arrangements of a subset are combinations, which is what the unscrambler searches when it returns shorter words.
How does it handle repeated letters?
It removes duplicates, so identical strings appear once. That is why the count for a word with repeats is lower than a plain factorial would predict.