Words from letters
Type your letters to see every word that can be made from them.
Your letters in any order. Type ? for a blank tile.
E.g. ?a??? for five-letter words with a in second position.
Type at least two characters.
Missing a word? Tell us anonymously
How it works
The tool scans the word list and shows the words that can be made from exactly the letters you have. Each letter is used at most as many times as you entered it.
If you have a blank tile, type ? and it counts as any letter.
Use the known-positions field to require a certain letter in a certain place, for example when you need to play through a letter already on the board. The letters in that field count as already played and are added to yours, so you don’t type them twice.
How the tool counts
Your letters go into a bag in which each letter is counted. The tool loads the word lists from the minimum length you chose up to as many letters as you have, at most 20, and keeps the words that need each letter no more often than it appears in the bag. Each question mark covers one missing letter. The minimum length can be set anywhere from two to eight letters.
If you fill in known positions without an asterisk, only that length is loaded, and the minimum length no longer matters. The letters retains give nine seven-letter words, among them nastier, retinas, retsina, stainer and stearin. Unlike the anagram solver, this tool keeps the word you typed, so retains itself is one of the nine. With one blank, aerstl? gives 61 seven-letter words, among them antlers, artless, cartels and falters. Adding a blank to retains, as retains?, gives 75 eight-letter words. Results are grouped by length, longest first, and shown 200 at a time.
Known positions
The field for known positions works like the crossword helper’s pattern. The letters in the pattern count as already on the board and are added to yours. With an asterisk for any number of letters, every length from the minimum up to your letters and the pattern’s together is searched: retains with *s gives 173 words ending in s, among them ratines and retinas, and also stainers, which uses both the s in retains and the one on the board. With k*, retains gives 57 words starting with k, such as kinase and keratin, although k is not one of its letters.
Accents and letters outside the alphabet
The English list contains only the letters a to z. The part taken from the English Speller Database was generated with accents stripped, so borrowed words such as cafe, facade and cliche are stored without them. The Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary also gives cafe and naive as headwords, with café and naïve as alternative spellings.
If you type café, the é is left out, a note under the field says so, and with the default minimum of three letters the tool searches c, a and f and finds only fac. Typing cafe gives six words, among them cafe and face. Your input is first converted to Unicode Normalization Form C, so an e followed by a combining acute accent becomes the single character é and is flagged too.
Sources
- wordlist_swedish
- SALDO (Språkbanken Text)
- ENABLE
- English Speller Database (SCOWL)
- Norsk ordbank (Språkrådet, UiB)
- Det Centrale Ordregister
- german-wordlist
- OpenTaal
- paroleitaliane
- Morphalou 3.1 (ATILF)
- LibreOffice pt_BR (VERO)
- SJP.PL (LibreOffice pl_PL)
- Rospell (LibreOffice ro)
- Wiktionary (kaikki.org)
- Unicode Standard Annex #15 – Unicode Normalization Forms
- Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary – cafe
- Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary – naive