Boggle solver
Type the sixteen letters as you read them across the board and this finds every word you can trace through touching squares, diagonals included, without stepping on the same square twice. Or press Shake and it will roll a real board using the actual Boggle dice.
Boggle scoring
| Letters | Points |
|---|---|
| 3 or 4 | 1 |
| 5 | 2 |
| 6 | 3 |
| 7 | 5 |
| 8 or more | 11 |
One eight-letter word is worth eleven three-letter words. That single rule should shape how you spend the three minutes.
Words scored elsewhere
Boggle ignores letter values entirely, so a Z is worth no more than an E. If you want the same letters valued the Scrabble way, the unscrambler does that, and the Scrabble finder ranks by it.
Three minutes, spent well
Sweep for the long words first
The scoring is so top-heavy that one eight-letter word beats eleven short ones. Spend the first minute looking for length, then fall back on volume. Most players do this the other way round and wonder why their scores plateau.
Follow the S
Every word you find that sits next to an S is potentially two words. Boards with an S in the middle are far richer than boards with one in a corner, because a central square touches eight others while a corner touches three.
Learn the shape of the board, not the letters
Corners touch three squares. Edges touch five. The four middle squares touch eight each. Long words almost always run through the middle, so start your search there and work outward.
Say the prefixes out loud
RE-, UN-, IN- and OUT- are all short, all common, and all easy to spot on a board. If one of them sits in a traceable line, you have the front of a long word and only need to find where it goes next.
How the search works
A four by four board has millions of possible paths, so checking each one against the dictionary would be hopeless.
Instead the solver first throws away every word in the dictionary that uses a letter your board does not have, which usually leaves a couple of thousand. It builds those into a prefix tree, then walks the board abandoning any path the moment it stops spelling the beginning of a real word.
A dead end like QZ is dropped after two squares rather than followed to the end, which is what keeps the whole thing to a few milliseconds.
About Boggle
How is Boggle different from every other word game?
Position matters. Everywhere else you hold a set of letters and can arrange them however you like. In Boggle the letters are fixed on a board and a word has to trace a path through squares that physically touch, including diagonally, without reusing a square.
So a board containing every letter of ELEPHANT does not necessarily contain the word ELEPHANT. The letters also have to be reachable in order, which is a completely different search.
How does Boggle scoring work?
By length rather than by letter, which is the other big departure. Three and four letter words are one point, five letters is two, six is three, seven is five, and anything of eight or more is eleven.
That eleven point jump is why an eight-letter word is worth hunting for even at the cost of missing several short ones. The solver shows the Boggle value on every result and totals the board.
What is the Qu square?
Physical Boggle sets print Qu on a single die rather than a bare Q, since a lone Q is nearly unplayable. This solver works with plain letters, so enter just Q in that square and read any Q result as needing the U that comes with it.
What does the Shake button do?
Rolls a real board. Boggle uses sixteen specific dice with fixed letters on each face, and Shake picks a random face from each die and places them in a random order, which is exactly what shaking the box does. That produces boards that behave like real ones, with sensible vowel distribution, rather than sixteen letters chosen at random.
Why does it find so many words I have never heard of?
Because the word list is a tournament list rather than a conversational one. On a typical board most results are inflections and obscure short words that are valid but that nobody would find under a timer. The ones marked common are the realistic targets.
Does it work for Boggle clones?
Yes for anything using a four by four grid with the same adjacency rule, which covers most of them. Games that let you reuse a square, or that only allow horizontal and vertical moves, will give different answers, so check the rules of whatever you are playing.