Word Sieve

Jumble solver · ENABLE1, 172,820 words

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

A jumbled word is an anagram with one extra rule: the answer is exactly as long as the jumble. The paper techniques behind it are in the unscrambling guide. Each box is looked up by itself as you type, so a fifth letter in box three cannot disturb the answer already in box one.

Jumbles0 of 4 Solved0 of 4 Answers— Keys searched— DictionaryENABLE1 · 172,820 words
Answers appear as you type. Up to 15 letters a box, and no ? blanks — 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, how it is kept, and what it cannot tell you

What is measured. One question, asked up to four times over: which entries of a named word list use exactly the letters in that box — every letter, none more or fewer times than you typed it — so an answer is always as long as the jumble it came from. There is no clue and no opinion about which answer a puzzle wants; a word is in the list or it is not. The strip counts the boxes holding letters, the boxes that produced a word, the answers, and the sizes of those searches added together.

How it is kept. The list ships as a file, wordlist/enable1.txt, precomputed at build time into an anagram-key index: each word's letters sorted, used as the key to every word sharing them. A jumble sorted is therefore already a key, so a box is one lookup rather than a walk through 168,548 words — TIFDR sorts to dfirt, which maps straight to its answer. The index is split by length, so a box pulls the slice for its own length, and four boxes of one length share one file.

What it cannot tell you. Which answer the puzzle wants when the letters spell more than one word — that is what the clue beside it is for. What the circled letters spell, a final answer normally being a phrase. And anything outside ENABLE1: proper nouns, hyphenations, and the 4,272 entries of 16 letters or more, in the shipped file but outside the index.

“Jumble”, in the ordinary sense

The word is used here as ordinary English — 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 one box means retyping. Each box is its own search, settled on its own, 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 — this page will not guess for you. Several words can share one set of letters: GNMOA returns 2 words, among and mango, and the busiest set in the whole index, SPARE, returns 12. You get all of them, never the one the page likes best.
Does it solve the final answer, the one made of the circled letters?
Not as a phrase, and it says so rather than pretending: a final answer is usually a pun spread over two or three words, while every box asks one question — which single word uses exactly these letters. Typed in, the circled letters get a single-word answer if the dictionary holds one.
One of my boxes found nothing. Is it broken?
Almost certainly not, and the two reasons get different words. When no word in ENABLE1 uses exactly those letters it says so, names the dictionary and says how many anagram keys it looked yours up among — a result, not an error, and a five-letter box reads 6,303 of them. XYLPQ lands there. When the index will not load it says that instead: a failed download shown as an empty answer would be this site lying about its dictionary.
Do the letters I type leave my device?
No, and it is the browser that stops them rather than a promise on this page. Every box is solved in your tab: the page fetches the slices of its word index your jumbles can reach, as plain text from this site, and does every lookup locally. The Content-Security-Policy pins connections to this origin alone, so a request carrying your letters elsewhere fails before it is made.

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