Anagram solver

What counts as an anagram

An anagram uses every letter of the original exactly once: nothing left over, nothing added. That makes it stricter than unscrambling, where any word you can spell from the letters counts. Spaces, capitals and punctuation don't matter, so a name or a whole phrase can have an anagram too. The six letters of LISTEN make 119 words in all, but only 6 other words use all six: ENLIST, INLETS, SILENT, TINSEL, ELINTS, INTELS.

Short words often have several anagrams: EVIL also gives LIVE, VEIL, VILE, VLEI, and STRESSED gives DESSERTS, which is also STRESSED spelled backward. Longer words and names rarely have a one-word anagram, which is where two-word anagrams come in.

Famous anagrams

Some anagrams are famous because the new words describe the old ones. Each pair below has been checked letter by letter, and the last column says whether the solver lists it, as a full anagram or a two-word anagram:

ELEVEN PLUS TWO and TWELVE PLUS ONE is a favorite because both sides also equal 13, the number of letters in each.

Anagrams of names

Names make good anagram puzzles, and a few well-known ones fit their owners surprisingly well:

MADAM CURIE has 62 two-word anagrams in this dictionary, and RADIUM CAME, fitting for the scientist who discovered radium with Pierre Curie, is among the first listed. ALEC GUINNESS has 419, including GENUINE CLASS.

How to find two-word anagrams

By hand, the method is simple: pick a word you can spell from the letters, cross its letters off, and see whether what is left is a word too. The solver does exactly that for every word that fits, then ranks the pairs. DORMITORY, for example, splits into 24 two-word anagrams, 3 of them made of two everyday words: DIRTY MOOR, DIRTY ROOM, ROOMY DIRT.

For phrases of three words or more, find two-word anagrams in stages: choose one word you would like in the answer, take its letters out, and solve the rest. Seeing the letters as tiles helps too: write them on scraps of paper and move them around.

Anagrams in history and wordplay

Scientists in the 1600s sometimes published a discovery as an anagram, to claim it before they were ready to explain it. Robert Hooke announced his law of springs as CEIIINOSSSTTUV, which is simply the Latin ut tensio, sic vis ("as the extension, so the force") with its letters in alphabetical order.

Today anagrams are everywhere in word puzzles. Cryptic crosswords hint at them with words like "mixed", "broken" or "confused" next to the letters to rearrange, and jumble puzzles give you the letters outright. For those, the word unscrambler shows every word the letters make, with filters, and the crossword solver fills in an answer from the letters you already have. For tile games, the word finder ranks words by score.