Word Descrambler
Give it a jumble and it gives back every word those letters contain, longest first. Useful when you are staring at a puzzle answer that will not resolve.
Working backwards from a jumble
A scrambled word is a word whose letters have been shuffled, and there is no clever way to reverse a shuffle. What works instead is to ignore the order entirely: sort the letters, look up everything filed under that arrangement, and you have the answer without ever considering a permutation.
That is why the order you type makes no difference. RTAEW, WATER and TAWER are the same query here. If a puzzle gives you letters in a grid or a circle, read them off in any order that is convenient.
When the jumble is longer than one word
Newspaper puzzles often scramble a phrase, and this tool will not split a letter set into several words. What it will do is show you every word those letters contain, which is usually enough to spot the pieces — find the longest word, remove its letters, and run what is left through again.
Results are grouped longest first because the long word is almost always the one you are missing. Within each group they are ordered by Scrabble value, which tends to float the unusual words up: if a jumble is hiding a J, X or Z, the word using it will be near the top of its group.
Narrowing a stubborn one
When the letters give too many answers, the filters are faster than reading the whole list. If a crossword tells you the word is seven letters and ends in ING, set both and the list usually collapses to a handful. The contains filter is the one people forget: knowing a word has QU in it somewhere is often enough on its own.
If the answer still is not there, the dictionary is the likely culprit. Switch to the Broad list, which adds around 44,000 rarer and more technical entries. Puzzle setters occasionally reach past the standard word list, and proper nouns are in neither dictionary by design.
Common questions
- Descrambler or unscrambler — which do I want?
- They are the same tool under different names. Descrambling usually describes taking a known jumble apart, unscrambling describes finding plays from a rack, but the question put to the dictionary is identical.
- Can it handle a scrambled phrase?
- Not as a phrase. Strip the spaces and give it the letters, and it will find the individual words, but it does not split a letter set into a multi-word phrase.
- Does the order I type the letters matter?
- No. Letters are sorted before lookup, so RETINAS and NASTIER are the same query and return the same answer.