Twelve letters
- conservation
- conversation
Every letter, exactly once
Anagram solver
This one is stricter than the main unscrambler on purpose. It only returns words that use all of your letters and nothing less, which is what you need when a puzzle has told you the answer is eight letters long and you have all eight in front of you.
- 12,438
- Anagram groups in our word list, from simple pairs upwards
- 28,948
- Words that have at least one anagram, about one in six
- 12 words
- The biggest single group, all from the letters A E P R S
Worth knowing
The distinction that trips people up
Almost every site calls these the same thing, and they are not. An anagram is a rearrangement, so every letter has to be used. Unscrambling is broader: it will happily give you a four-letter word from your seven tiles, because in a game that is often exactly what you want.
Which one you need depends on the puzzle. A newspaper anagram, a crossword clue with an enumeration, or a puzzle answer of known length all want the strict version. A Scrabble rack does not.
LISTEN contains 91 words. It has six anagrams. Both numbers are correct and they answer different questions.
If you came here from a game rather than a puzzle, the main unscrambler will serve you better, and the jumble solver is tuned specifically for the newspaper format where the answer is always an everyday word.
The largest anagram groups in English
Every one of these is a real group from our word list. Click any set to open it in the solver.
| Letters | Words | How many |
|---|---|---|
| A E P R S | apers, apres, asper, pares, parse, pears, prase, presa, rapes, reaps, spare, spear | 12 |
| A E L R S T | alerts, alters, artels, estral, laster, ratels, salter, slater, staler, stelar, talers | 11 |
| A E L S T | least, setal, slate, stale, steal, stela, taels, tales, teals, tesla | 10 |
| A C E P R S | capers, crapes, escarp, pacers, parsec, recaps, scrape, secpar, spacer | 9 |
| E I N R S T | estrin, inerts, insert, inters, niters, nitres, sinter, triens, trines | 9 |
| A E L P S T | palest, palets, pastel, petals, plates, pleats, septal, staple, tepals | 9 |
Notice what they have in common. Every group is built from cheap, high-frequency letters. There is no large anagram group containing a J, a Q or a Z, because English simply does not recombine those letters many different ways.
Pairs worth collecting
Anagrams where the two meanings have nothing to do with each other
These are the ones puzzle setters love, and all of them are pairs of ordinary words rather than obscure ones. Each link opens the solver so you can confirm it.
Eleven letters
- considerate desecration
- description predictions
- intervening reinventing
- rationalize realization
Ten letters
- admonition domination
- dealership leadership
- directions discretion
- guesthouse houseguest
Short and useful
- ate, eat, eta, tae, tea
- mate, meat, meta, tame, team
- ascot, coast, coats, costa, tacos
- lament, mantel, mantle, mental
The four and five letter groups are the ones actually worth memorising for word games.
Doing it in your head
How to solve an anagram without a solver
Worth learning, because it is faster than typing once you have the knack, and because it is the part that makes puzzles enjoyable rather than mechanical.
Write the letters in a circle
This sounds like a trick and it genuinely works. Written in a line, your brain keeps reading the letters in the order they are printed, and that order is exactly the one you need to escape. Arranged in a ring there is no first letter, so the groupings come apart much more easily.
Pull out the endings first
Look for the letters that make a familiar tail: -ING, -ION, -ENT, -ERS, -EST, -TION, -ABLE. If the letters contain an ING, set those three aside and solve the shorter problem that remains. Most multi-syllable answers are a stem plus one of maybe fifteen endings.
Then look for the awkward letters
A J, Q, V, X or Z narrows things dramatically because so few words contain them. If there is a Q, it almost certainly needs a U next to it, and now you have a two-letter block that has to sit somewhere. Rare letters are constraints, and constraints make the search smaller.
Say the consonant clusters out loud
English allows a limited set of consonant clusters at the start of a word: ST, SP, CH, TH, BR, CL, GR and so on. It does not allow most of the others. Muttering the possible pairs is a surprisingly quick way to eliminate wrong starts, and it is what experienced solvers are doing when they look like they are just staring at the page.
Questions
About anagrams
What is the difference between an anagram and unscrambling letters?
An anagram uses every letter exactly once. Unscrambling usually means finding anything you can build from the letters, including shorter words that leave some unused.
LISTEN has 91 words hiding in it if you allow shorter ones, but only six true anagrams: ELINTS, ENLIST, INLETS, LISTEN, SILENT and TINSEL. This page gives you the six. If you want all 91, the word unscrambler is the tool you want.
How many English words actually have anagrams?
Fewer than people assume. Of the 171,280 words in our list, 28,948 have at least one anagram, so roughly one word in six. Those cluster into 12,438 groups, and most groups are just a pair.
What is the longest pair of anagrams?
Among everyday words, CONSERVATION and CONVERSATION at twelve letters each, which is a nice one because the two meanings are so unrelated. At eleven letters there are several, including CONSIDERATE and DESECRATION, and INTERVENING and REINVENTING.
Go into more obscure vocabulary and longer pairs exist, but they stop being satisfying once nobody recognises either word.
Which letters have the most anagrams?
The set A, E, P, R, S beats everything else. Those five letters make twelve different words: APERS, APRES, ASPER, PARES, PARSE, PEARS, PRASE, PRESA, RAPES, REAPS, SPARE and SPEAR. Six letters gets you close with ALERTS and its ten companions.
There is a pattern to it. Groups this large are always built from the cheap, common letters, because those are the ones English recombines most freely.
Can I use a blank or wildcard here?
You can, using ? or *, and it works the way you would expect: the wildcard fills one position with any letter, and the result still has to use every slot. So LISTE? returns the six-letter words that fit, LISTED and LISTEN among them.
Does capitalisation or punctuation matter?
No. Type it however you like and the solver strips everything that is not a letter, so a phrase with spaces and an apostrophe works fine. Bear in mind that classic anagram puzzles often rearrange a whole phrase into another phrase, and this tool finds single words rather than phrases.