Word SieveWord solvers · public-domain dictionary · nothing you type is sent
A sieve for letters
Pick the tool that fits your puzzle and tip your letters in. Every word they can make stays in the mesh, sorted longest first; letters that make no word fall through. The mesh is a public-domain dictionary of 172,781 words, and the shaking happens in your browser. Four guides cover the measured facts behind the tools, with every number computed from the shipped list.
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Unscramble
Word unscramblerEvery word in the dictionary your letters can build, grouped by length with the longest first. Blanks allowed. When the answer is nothing, it says so.
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Narrow
Word finderYour letters, then a pattern on top of them: words that start with, end with, or contain a run you name. The strip prints how many words the rack solved and how many the pattern kept, so you can see what the filter cost.
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Whole rack
Anagram solverWords that use every letter you typed and no others, plus every way the rack splits into two words. It counts both searches and prints both totals.
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Points
Word makerEvery word your letters make, ranked by the standard letter values with the highest total first and a bar beside each word. The full value table is printed on the page, and the ranking uses the same numbers.
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Four at once
Jumble solverFour scrambled words, laid out like the newspaper puzzle. Each box is solved on its own as you type, as an exact-length anagram, and the strip counts the anagram keys the lookups searched.
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Squares
Crossword solverType the pattern with an underscore for each blank square, as in
c_a_t. The squares you type fix the length. The strip repeats the pattern it read, counts the known and blank squares, and says how many words it read. -
Clues
Five-letter clue solverEnter the letters locked to a square, the letters in the word but somewhere else, and the letters ruled out. Every five-letter word consistent with all three comes back ranked by how common its letters are in the survivors.
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Browse
5 letter wordsA plain list of every five-letter word the dictionary holds, in alphabetical order, with a count for each starting letter and three filters (starts with, contains, ends with) to narrow it.
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How it works
MethodologyWhere the word list came from, how the anagram index is built and searched, and what a match means.
One named list behind every answer
Every answer on this site comes from one word list: Word Sieve's edition of ENABLE1, a public-domain English word list. Before publication, 39 entries of upstream ENABLE1 were excluded, leaving 172,781. The 168,509 entries that are 2 to 15 letters long make up the index the solvers search.
The list ships with the site as a plain text file you can open, so you can check any answer against it. A match means the word is in that file and fits the letters, pattern or clues you entered.
Sometimes the answer is no words. When your letters build nothing in the list, the solver says so in those words, names the dictionary and reports how many anagram keys it checked. It never fills the gap with a near miss or a word it invented. A rack the solver cannot read, or an index file that fails to load, gets its own message, so a broken search does not look like an empty one.
Everything happens on your side of the wire
The letters you type stay in your browser. The site has no server-side solver, no account, no cookie and no analytics of any kind. The Content-Security-Policy sent with every page limits network connections to this site's own origin, so the browser blocks a request that would carry your rack to any other address before it is made.
What a solver page does download is the dictionary index, and only the word lengths your rack can reach. The index is split into fourteen files, one per word length, so a five-letter rack pulls about 127 KB and a seven-letter rack about 645 KB. The files arrive after the page has rendered, so they are counted separately from page weight, and each tool prints the size of the index it used under your results.
The methodology page explains how the index is built, why a seven-letter rack without blanks needs at most 120 lookups where a scan would compare it with all 172,781 entries, the two kinds of search that scan instead, and the limits that apply to every search.