Anagram Solver

Anagram, strictly

An anagram uses every letter of the original exactly once. Listen and silent are anagrams; listen and list are not, because the second one drops three letters. This tool enforces the strict version, which is what separates it from the unscrambler — that one returns partial words too.

The practical consequence: it is normal for this tool to find nothing. Most letter combinations have no anagram at all, and most words have exactly one. Finding several is unusual enough to be worth noticing.

Where anagrams actually turn up

• Cryptic crosswords. Roughly a quarter of cryptic clues contain an anagram, flagged by a word meaning "mixed", "broken", "confused" or "cooked". The letters to rearrange are usually sitting in plain sight next to the indicator.
• Puzzle hunts and escape rooms. A set of letters with no obvious meaning is very often one rearrangement away from an instruction.
• Names and pseudonyms. Authors have hidden their own names in character names for centuries; running a suspicious name through here is how you check.

Multi-word anagrams

This tool does not split its answers across several words — it will find silent from listen, but not tin lees. That is a genuinely harder search with a much noisier result set, and for most puzzles the single-word answer is the one you want anyway.