Word Sieve

Jumble solver · ENABLE1, 172,781 words

Four jumbled words in, four answers out, each one solved on its own

Type each scrambled word into its own box. A box is solved by itself a moment after you stop typing, or at once when you press Enter, which also moves you to the next box. A jumbled word is an anagram with one extra rule: the answer is exactly as long as the jumble. The paper techniques are in the unscrambling guide.

Jumbles0 of 4 Solved0 of 4 Answers— Keys searched— DictionaryENABLE1 · 172,781 words
Answers appear as you type. Up to 15 letters a box. Blanks (?) do not work here, because a jumble uses every letter it gives you.

The word index is not loaded yet. It ships as 14 plain-text shards, one per word length; each box pulls the single shard for its own length, and the figure for the jumbles you type appears here.

What is measured

What is measured. One question, asked once for each box that holds letters: which entries of the word list use exactly the letters in that box, each letter as many times as you typed it. The strip counts the boxes holding letters, the boxes that produced a word, the answers, and the anagram keys searched, added up across the boxes.

How it is kept. The list is Word Sieve's ENABLE1-derived edition, with 39 entries excluded, and it ships as a plain text file, wordlist/enable1.txt. Before publication it is turned into an anagram-key index: each word's letters are sorted, and that sorted key leads to every word spelled with the same letters. A jumble, sorted, is already a key, so each box takes a single lookup in the index of 168,509 words: TIFDR sorts to dfirt, which leads straight to DRIFT. The index is split by word length, so a box pulls only the slice for its own length, and four boxes of the same length share one file.

What it cannot tell you. Proper nouns and hyphenated forms are not in the list. The 4,272 entries of 16 letters or more sit in the shipped file, outside the index.

“Jumble”, in the ordinary sense

The word is used here in its ordinary English sense: letters printed out of order. This page is not connected to any newspaper, syndicate or puzzle publisher. It reproduces no puzzle and holds no answer key; it reads what you type and looks it up in a public-domain word list you can download and check.

Questions

Why four boxes?
Because the puzzle prints four scrambled words, and a single box would mean retyping. Each box is its own search, so a stray character in box three cannot blank the answer in box one, and an empty box is not searched.
It gave me two answers. Which one does the puzzle want?
Whichever one the clue fits. Several words can share one set of letters: GNMOA returns 2 words, among and mango, and SPARE, the busiest set in the whole index, returns 12. The page lists all of them in alphabetical order and leaves the choice to you.
Does it solve the final answer, the one made of the circled letters?
Not as a phrase. A final answer is usually a pun spread over two or three words, and each box asks only which single word uses exactly its letters. Type the circled letters into a box and you get a single-word answer if the dictionary holds one. For a two-word answer, the anagram solver splits up to 12 letters into pairs of words.
One of my boxes found nothing. Is it broken?
Almost certainly not. When no word in ENABLE1 uses exactly those letters, that box says so, names the dictionary and gives the number of anagram keys it looked yours up among: 6,295 for a five-letter box. XYLPQ gets that answer. If the index fails to load, the page says that instead, so a failed download never reads as an empty answer.
Do the letters I type leave my device?
No. Every box is solved in your tab: the page fetches the slices of its word index that your jumbles can reach, as plain text from this site, and does every lookup locally. The site's Content-Security-Policy limits connections to its own origin, so your browser blocks any request that would carry your letters somewhere else before it is made.

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