Word Sieve

Word unscrambler · ENABLE1, 172,781 words

Word unscrambler

Type your letters to find every word in ENABLE1 they can make, listed longest first, then narrow or copy the list. The search runs in your browser. Some people call this tool a descrambler. For techniques and limits, see the unscrambling guide.

Racknone typed Words found— Longest— DictionaryENABLE1 · 172,781 words Indexed168,509 words · 2–15 letters

Up to 15 characters. Use ? for a blank, at most two.

Narrow or copy these results

Sieve your letters first. Filters narrow the result without another dictionary request.

The word index is not loaded yet. It ships as 14 plain-text shards, one per word length, totalling 3,203,788 bytes; a rack pulls only the shards it can reach, and the figure for your rack appears here after a sieve.

What is measured

What is measured. Which entries of the word list can be spelled with the letters you typed, each letter used no more times than you typed it. Nothing is scored or weighted by frequency, and every word shown is in the list. The Words found figure in the strip counts every match.

How it is kept. The list 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. The index is split by word length, and a search loads only the lengths your rack can reach. Those shards are fetched after the page loads, which keeps them out of the page's weight, and the exact bytes your rack pulled are printed under the results.

What it cannot tell you. Whether a word is worth playing, since nothing here knows the board. Proper nouns, hyphenated forms and most inflections coined since the list was compiled are not in it.

The dictionary, named

This unscrambler checks your letters against ENABLE1, the Enhanced North American Benchmark Lexicon, compiled by M. Leo Cooper and Alan Beale and released into the public domain. Word Sieve's edition holds 172,781 entries, in lowercase letters only, with no proper nouns and no hyphens. Because the list is public domain, the site ships its whole edition as a file you are free to download and check any result against.

The index this page loads covers 168,509 of those entries, every one from 2 to 15 letters long, grouped into 152,185 anagram keys. Entries of 16 letters or more, 4,272 of them, stay in the shipped file, where you can read them, and out of the index: a rack holds at most 15 characters and can never build a longer word, so indexing them would ship bytes no search could use.

Lookups for plain racks, a scan for blanks

Every anagram of a word has the same sorted letters, so the index maps the key aeklwy to the word weakly. To unscramble a rack, the page sorts each combination of your letters and looks it up as a key. A seven-letter rack has at most 120 distinct combinations of two letters or more, so a solve takes at most 120 map lookups and never walks all 172,781 words.

A blank can be any letter, so answering by lookup would mean 26 substituted keys per combination for one blank and 351 for two. With a blank in the rack, the sieve scans instead: it walks every anagram key in the shards it loaded and keeps each key whose letters exceed your rack by no more than the number of blanks you typed. That scan covers anagram keys, which are fewer than words: at most the 152,185 keys of the whole index. The methodology page describes both paths.

Questions

Which dictionary is this, and how many words are in it?
Word Sieve's ENABLE1-derived edition, with 39 entries excluded: a public-domain English word list of 172,781 entries. The 168,509 entries of 2 to 15 letters sit in the index this page loads. The other 4,272 are 16 letters or longer, too long for a rack of at most 15 characters. The list is served as plain text at /wordlist/enable1.txt, with a provenance note beside it, so you can count the entries yourself.
Will the words it finds be valid in my word game?
Sometimes. ENABLE1 is a general English word list. It is not the official word list of any particular game. The tournament lists (TWL and NWL in North America, Collins elsewhere) are proprietary compilations that this site does not use or ship, and they will not be added. A game that judges by one of them may refuse a word this page finds, and your game may accept a word ENABLE1 lacks. This page is a word unscrambler, also called a descrambler, and under either name it searches the same list. Word Sieve is an independent tool and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Scrabble, Words with Friends, Wordle, or their publishers.
What does the question mark do?
It is a blank: one character that stands for any letter. Type STROKE? and the last tile can be anything from A to Z. You can use up to two blanks, which is how many blank tiles a rack carries in the games people bring here. Each one widens the answer sharply: STROKES returns 92 words, STROKE? returns 1,139. A blank also switches the sieve from lookups to a scan of anagram keys.
It found nothing. Is it broken?
Almost certainly not. When no word in ENABLE1 can be built from your letters, the page says so, names the dictionary and gives the number of anagram keys it checked. It never shows an empty box or offers a near miss. Racks of rare consonants often end this way: QQQ and JQXZ both come back with nothing, because no word in the list can be spelled from those letters.
Do the letters I type leave my device?
No. The rack is solved in your tab: the page fetches the slices of its word index that your rack can reach, as plain text files 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. The site has no accounts, cookies or analytics, and no server here ever sees a rack.

The rest of the site

Rather play than solve?

The same letters, as a game: Word Game Library runs unlimited word games in your browser. Like this site, it is free, needs no account and tracks nothing.