Every tool in the cockpit

Picking the right solver

Every tool here points the same dictionary at your letters; what changes is the constraint each one enforces. The general unscrambler spends your letters and returns everything buildable, including shorter words. The anagram solver refuses anything that does not use all of them. The pattern solver cares about position rather than which letters you hold. Choosing the one that matches your puzzle is the difference between a list of four candidates and a list of four hundred.

If you are not sure, start with the unscrambler and narrow from there. Its prefix, suffix and length filters cover a good share of what the specialised tools do, and the results tell you quickly whether your letters are even close to an answer.

Tile games

Scrabble and Words With Friends use different tile values, so the same rack ranks differently in each. The two dedicated finders exist for that reason: each scores with its own table, and the ordering they produce is the one that matters at the board you are actually playing on.

Neither knows your board. Bonus squares, hooks and blocked lanes routinely make a mid-scoring word the better play, so use the ranking to shortlist and your own eyes to decide.

Puzzles with a fixed shape

The newspaper Jumble, Text Twist and Wordle each have rules the general solver does not know about. The Jumble scrambles one complete word per clue, Text Twist works within three to six letters, and Wordle feeds you positional information one guess at a time. Their solvers bake those rules in so the output is already filtered to what the puzzle allows.

Crosswords sit between the two. When you know positions, the pattern solver reads C_T_E the way the grid does; when you only know which letters are in there somewhere, the containment search over on Words With Letters is the better fit.

Generators, not solvers

A few tools here run in the other direction. The word scrambler turns a word into a puzzle, which is how you make a worksheet rather than finish one. The random word generator, Pictionary generator and imposter word generator produce material for games night. They share the same dictionary, so the words they hand out are words the solvers recognise.

Frequently asked questions