Two ways to use your tiles

Find Words lists every word that can be built from some or all of your tiles. Exact Anagrams is stricter: it lists only the words that use every tile exactly once. The same six tiles, L I S T E N, show the difference. Find Words returns every word those letters can build, right down to two-letter words, while Exact Anagrams returns just five: ENLIST, INLETS, LISTEN, SILENT and TINSEL.

Choose Find Words when you are holding a rack in a tile game or working through a puzzle and want to see every option. Choose Exact Anagrams when the answer has to use all of the letters, as in a puzzle that asks you to rearrange a word or phrase.

A worked example: A E I N R S T

Seven tiles, A E I N R S T, make a classic test rack. In Find Words mode they produce 200 words: 12 two-letter words, 41 three-letter, 62 four-letter, 61 five-letter, 20 six-letter and 4 seven-letter. Switching to Exact Anagrams narrows that to the four seven-letter words: RETAINS, RETINAS, RETSINA and STEARIN.

If you would rather see familiar vocabulary first, turn on Everyday words only. 105 of the 200 words are on the everyday list, and the page tells you that the other 95 are hidden instead of quietly dropping them.

How blank tiles work

Type ? for each blank tile, up to four per search. A blank can stand in for any letter but, as in a tile game, it scores nothing. Take the tiles R A T E ?: the blank can become a C to spell CRATE. CRATE is worth 4 points in Scrabble rather than 7, because the C came from the blank and only R, A, T and E score. A blank can never be used for a letter you have put in Exclude letters.

Four blanks is the limit because blanks make nearly every word fit. Six tiles with four blanks (A E ? ? ? ?) already match 10,948 words, which is too many to be useful.

Filters that save time

• Ends with: tiles A D E G I N R T with Ends with ING return 14 words, from DING and RING up to READING, TRADING and TREADING. Add an exact length of 8 and only TREADING remains.
• Starts with: from A E I N R S T, Starts with ST leaves 12 words, including STAIR, STRAIN and STEARIN.
• Contains: use it for a letter combination that is already on the board and has to appear in the word you play.
• Exclude letters: leaving S out of the same seven tiles cuts the list from 200 words to 71.
• Exact length, min length and max length apply to Find Words. Exact Anagrams always uses your tile count as the length.

Choosing a sort order and a scoring system

• A–Z is the easiest way to scan a long list or check whether a word you have in mind is there.
• Longest first groups the words by length with the longest group on top, which is where full-rack plays and high scores tend to be.
• Shortest first starts with the short words that fit into tight spaces and make small extensions to words already on the board.
• Highest score lists every word by points, best first, with ties in alphabetical order.

Whatever the order, nothing is cut off. The page always reports the total, and Show more words reveals the rest. Scores add up the letter values of the scoring system you choose, and the two systems differ: QUIZ is worth 22 in Scrabble and 23 in Words With Friends, because U is worth 1 in one game and 2 in the other.

What Everyday words only does

The filter is a convenience, not a quality grade. It keeps words that appear on curated lists of common vocabulary, plus their regular forms such as plurals and -ed or -ing endings. It is off by default because it is deliberately cautious: INSERT and SATIRE are ordinary English words, but they are not on those lists, so they stay hidden while the filter is on. Use it to find familiar options quickly, and switch it off when you want everything.

About the word list and the scores

Searches use a general English word list of 97,330 words that is shared with the other DONToolbox word tools. It is not an official Scrabble, Collins or Words With Friends dictionary, so it may contain words those games reject and may miss words they accept. Before you play a word in a ranked or competitive game, check it in that game's own dictionary. Scores are plain letter totals: they leave out premium squares, bonus tiles and the extra points some games give for using a whole rack.

If you arrived from our old Anagram Solver or Word Finder pages: those tools have been combined here. Find Words does what Word Finder did, Exact Anagrams covers the Anagram Solver, and the exact-length, exclude-letters and sorting options from both are included.

Related tools and reading

Working on a crossword instead? The Crossword Solver finds words from a pattern such as C_A_T. For a five-letter puzzle, the 5-Letter Word Solver narrows the answer from green, yellow and grey clues, and the Word Generator creates random words for practice. Our guide Anagrams Explained covers how to spot anagrams by eye.

Questions people ask