Word Sieve

Word unscrambler · ENABLE1, 172,820 words

Put your letters in, and every word the dictionary can make falls out

A rack goes in the top; the words come out the bottom, longest first. The dictionary is named and its size is printed, the whole thing runs in your browser, and when there is nothing to find the page says so in those words instead of showing you something close.

Racknone typed Words found— Longest— DictionaryENABLE1 · 172,820 words Indexed168,548 words · 2–15 letters

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

The word index is not loaded yet. It ships as 14 plain-text shards, one per word length, totalling 3,204,287 bytes; a rack pulls only the shards it can reach, and the figure for your rack appears here after a sieve.

What is measured, how it is kept, and what it cannot tell you

What is measured. One thing: which entries of a named word list can be spelled using the letters you supplied, each letter no more times than you supplied it. There is no scoring model, no frequency weighting and no opinion about which answers are good — a word is in the list or it is not, and every word shown is in the list. The count in the readout is the size of that set, not a sample of it.

How it is kept. The list is shipped as a file, wordlist/enable1.txt, and precomputed at build time into an anagram-key index: each word's letters sorted, used as the key to every word that shares them. The index is split by word length so a rack pulls only the lengths it could reach, and the shards are fetched after the page has loaded, which is why they are not part of the page's weight. The exact bytes your rack pulled are printed under the results.

What it cannot tell you. Whether a word is legal in your game — that depends on a word list this site does not use and cannot ship. Whether a word is one you should play, since nothing here knows the board. And anything about words that are not in ENABLE1: proper nouns, hyphenations, most inflections coined since the list was compiled, and the 4,272 entries of 16 letters or more, which are in the file but outside the index because no 15-character rack can reach them.

The dictionary, named

Most word unscramblers will not tell you what they are checking against. That is the interesting part of the answer, so it is printed on the page: this one uses ENABLE1, the Enhanced North American Benchmark Lexicon compiled by M. Leo Cooper and Alan Beale and released into the public domain. It holds 172,820 words, all lowercase, letters only, no proper nouns and no hyphens.

The index this page loads covers the 168,548 of those words that are between 2 and 15 letters long, grouped into 152,215 anagram keys. The remaining 4,272 entries are 16 letters or longer. They are in the shipped file and you can read them there; they are not in the index because a rack is capped at 15 characters and a word longer than the rack can never be built from it, so indexing them would ship bytes no query could reach. Saying that plainly is better than letting a visitor conclude the dictionary is 4,272 words smaller than it is.

ENABLE1 is a general English word list. It is not the word list of any game, and the official tournament lists — TWL and NWL in North America, Collins elsewhere — are proprietary compilations that this site does not use, does not ship, and will not add. That is a permanent choice rather than a gap waiting to be filled, and it is the reason the results here can be checked against a file you are free to download.

Lookups, not a scan — except where it is a scan

An unscrambler can be written by walking all 172,820 words and testing each one against your letters. This one does not, because it does not have to: the sorted letters of a word are the same for every anagram of it, so the index maps aeklw to weakly once, and the question "what can I build?" becomes "which of my letter combinations are keys?". A seven-letter rack has at most 120 distinct combinations of two letters or more, so the page does about a hundred and twenty map lookups rather than a hundred and seventy thousand comparisons.

A blank breaks that, and the page does not pretend otherwise. A blank is any letter, so it would take hundreds of substituted keys per combination to answer by lookup. With a blank in the rack the sieve switches to a different method: it walks the keys of the shards it has loaded — tens of thousands, not hundreds of thousands of words — and keeps every key whose letters exceed your rack by no more than the number of blanks you typed. That is a scan, it is bounded by keys rather than words, and it is named as a scan on the methodology page rather than described as a lookup it is not.

Questions

Which dictionary is this, and how many words are in it?
ENABLE1, a public-domain English word list of 172,820 words. 168,548 of them are between 2 and 15 letters long and sit in the index this page loads; the other 4,272 are 16 letters or longer, and since a rack here holds at most 15 characters they could never be built from one anyway. The list is served as a plain text file at /wordlist/enable1.txt with a provenance note beside it, so the number above is something you can count rather than something you have to take.
Will the words it finds be valid in my word game?
Sometimes, and this page will not pretend otherwise. ENABLE1 is a general English word list, not the official word list of any particular game. The tournament lists — TWL and NWL in North America, Collins elsewhere — are proprietary compilations that are not used here and never will be, so a word this sieve finds may be refused by a game judging against one of those, and a word your game accepts may simply be missing from ENABLE1. 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 standing for any letter. Type STROKE? and the last tile becomes 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, and each one widens the answer sharply — STROKES returns 92 words, STROKE? returns 1,139. A blank also changes how the sieve searches, which the methodology page describes rather than glosses over.
It found nothing. Is it broken?
Almost certainly not. When no word in ENABLE1 can be built from your letters, the page says exactly that and names the dictionary it checked, rather than showing an empty box or offering a near miss. Racks of rare consonants do it routinely: QQQ and JQXZ both come back with nothing, because there is genuinely nothing to come back with. Reporting an empty result honestly is the whole design here — the sieve shows what the dictionary contains and never a word it made up.
Do the letters I type leave my device?
No, and it is the browser that stops them rather than a promise on this page. 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 Content-Security-Policy served with each page pins connections to this origin alone, so a request carrying your letters anywhere else fails before it is made. There is no account, no cookie, no analytics, and no server here that ever sees a rack.

The rest of the site