Anagram solver

What the solver finds

• Anagrams: single words that use every letter exactly once. LISTEN gives SILENT.
• Two-word anagrams: pairs of words that together use every letter. DORMITORY gives DIRTY ROOM.
• Words inside: every shorter word your letters can make, longest first, for word games and for building longer phrases a piece at a time.

Results come from the 20,000 most common words in a large collection of English books and are ordered by how common each word is, so the answer a puzzle setter most likely meant comes first.

Blanks

Type ? for a letter you don't know. TR?ASURE finds TREASURE, and ??ACK finds five-letter words that use A, C and K plus any two other letters: BLACK, TRACK, CAKES. That makes the solver useful for half-solved clues as well as true anagrams.

Anagrams in puzzle hunts

Anagrams turn up as the final step of a lot of hunts. You collect a set of letters from several puzzles, and the answer is whatever they rearrange into. Two habits help:

• Check the count. A missing or extra letter usually means one earlier answer is wrong. The solver shows how many letters you've entered.
• Build long answers in pieces. Find a likely word inside the letters, remove those letters, and solve the rest. Phrases of three or more words almost always come out this way.