Word Scramble Solver

A word scramble is a puzzle in which the letters of a word have been shuffled and you have to put them back in order. ELPPA is apple, and RCTEAHA is trachea. Scrambles are one of the oldest word games around. You will find them in puzzle books, on classroom worksheets, in party games, in timed mobile apps and as warm-ups in language lessons. Many digital versions also give points for bonus words, shorter words made from the same letters.

Type the scrambled letters and the solver checks them against every English word in our dictionaries. The answer that uses all of the letters appears at the top. Below it are the bonus words, grouped by length and sorted with the most familiar words first. This page hides two-letter words because scramble games almost never count them. If you need them, they are still available on the full word unscrambler.

If the top group has more than one word, the scramble has several valid answers. Any of them is technically correct, but a puzzle with a theme or clue usually wants the most common one. That word is listed first.

Start with the shape of the word

Count the letters and the vowels. A six-letter scramble with two vowels is probably consonant-vowel-consonant-consonant-vowel-consonant, or close to it. Sketch the pattern with dashes and try consonants in the gaps.

Look for doubled letters

Repeated letters often sit together (LL, SS, EE, OO, TT), so try the pair side by side first. They don't always: in BDEORR the two Rs end up apart in border. If the pair won't fit together, split it with a vowel.

Peel off endings and beginnings

Remove -ING, -ED, -ER, -LY or -S, or RE- and UN-. Solving the remaining four or five letters is much easier.

Use the theme

Scramble sets in quizzes and classrooms are usually themed: animals, food, the body, countries. If you know the theme, think of words in that category with the right length before you rearrange anything.

Teachers use scrambles to reinforce spelling lists and new vocabulary because a scramble makes students look at every letter. A few ideas that work well:

• Level the difficulty by word length. Four- and five-letter scrambles suit early readers. Seven letters and up challenge older students.
• Add a bonus-word round. After the main answer, students race to find as many three-letter words as they can. Use this page to prepare the answer key in seconds.
• Theme the list around the week's topic, and ask students to use each unscrambled word in a sentence.
• Make the puzzles here too. The Scramble a word tab at the top of this page mixes up any word you type, so the worksheet and its answer key come from one place.

For source words of a specific size, browse the four-letter, five-letter and six-letter word lists.

Scrambles get much harder with every extra letter, because the number of possible orderings grows very quickly. Five letters can be arranged 120 ways, six letters 720 ways and seven letters 5,040 ways. Short scrambles like ELPPA fall to a moment's thought. Seven-letter ones like RCTEAHA, which has exactly one full-length answer, can stump adults. If you are setting puzzles, mix lengths: a few easy four- and five-letter words keep everyone going, and one or two seven-letter scrambles give strong solvers something to chew on.

Newspaper jumbles add a second stage: circled letters from four scrambles form the answer to a cartoon riddle. Our jumble solver walks you through both stages. Timed games such as Text Twist ask for every word in a rack. Use the Text Twist solver for those. For letter-wheel apps, see the Wordscapes helper.