Making words from a fixed set of letters
Whether the letters came off a rack, out of a puzzle grid or from a spelling worksheet, the question is the same: what can these actually spell? Answering it by hand means shuffling tiles and hoping a pattern jumps out, which works for four letters and falls apart at seven. This page does the shuffling exhaustively. It compares your letters against every entry in the ENABLE dictionary — about 172,000 words, all of them public domain — and returns each one that can be built from what you hold, using some of the letters or all of them. Nothing is left out because it looked unlikely, and nothing is invented: every result is a real dictionary word you can check.
How to search
- Type your letters in any order. Duplicates matter — two Ts let you spell words that one T cannot — but sequence does not.
- Use a question mark for each wildcard or blank, up to three. Results show the substituted letter underlined.
- Press Search. Words arrive grouped by length with the longest group first, and the highest-scoring word at the top of each group.
- Narrow the set with the filters: a required first letter, a required last letter, a letter that must appear somewhere, an exact length, or common words only.
- Click a word to copy it, or follow it through to its own page to see what shorter words hide inside it.
What the results tell you
Each group header counts the words of that length, so an empty seven-letter group is an immediate answer: there is no bonus play in this rack, stop looking for one. The score beside each word is the sum of its tile values under whichever tile set you have selected, with blanks counted as zero. Board multipliers are deliberately left out, because the tool has no idea where on the grid you intend to put the word — the score is there to rank plays against each other, not to predict your final total. Switching tile sets reshuffles that ranking more than people expect, since several letters are worth different amounts in the classic set and in the Words With Friends-style set.
Getting more out of a poor set of letters
- All consonants and no vowel? Check the two- and three-letter groups first; a handful of words such as CWM and NTH exist precisely for that situation.
- Holding a Q with no U, look at the Q words without U list before writing the tile off.
- Use the contains filter with a letter already on the board. Every word returned is then one you can legally hook onto.
- Turn on common words only when you are teaching or playing with someone who will challenge an obscure entry.
- If you want only the words that use every letter, the anagram solver answers that specific question more directly.
Questions
How many letters can I enter?
Up to fifteen, which is the longest word in the dictionary. Seven or eight letters is the usual case for a tile rack, and a full fifteen is useful when you are checking what a long word contains. Order never matters — the tool sorts your letters for you.
What does the question mark do?
It stands for a blank tile and can become any letter. You can use up to three. In every result the letter the blank stood in for is underlined, so you can see at a glance what you would actually be spending the wildcard on.
Can I force a word to contain a particular letter?
Yes. Open the filters and use the contains box for a letter you need to play through on the board, or the starts-with and ends-with boxes when a word has to hook onto something already on the grid. You can also pin the result length.
Why does a word I know not appear?
Either it needs a letter you did not enter, or it is not in the ENABLE list. Proper nouns, hyphenated words, abbreviations and anything with an apostrophe are excluded by design. The how it works page covers the dictionary in detail.