User Guide
Type the scrambled letters
Enter them in any order — RALIT, OCMPUTER, whatever the puzzle prints. Capitals appear automatically and anything that is not a letter is stripped as you type, so punctuation from a copy-paste does no harm. The field holds up to 20 characters.
Use ? for a letter you cannot make out
Newspaper print smudges and a photographed puzzle can be worse. A question mark stands in for any single unknown letter, so RA?IT still finds the answer rather than returning nothing.
Solve
Press the button or hit Enter. Results are ordered with the full-length answers first — those are what the puzzle wants — followed by every shorter word the same letters can make, down to two letters.
Narrow to familiar words if you want
Answers come from a curated dictionary, so abbreviations and proper nouns never appear. Tick Everyday words only to go further and hide the obscure, technical and archaic words that are valid in word games but that nobody would use in conversation — useful when the puzzle answer is obviously an ordinary word.
Try an example first
Five sample jumbles sit below the box. Tapping one fills the field and solves it immediately, which is the quickest way to see how the ordering works before you type your own.
About the Jumble Solver
The daily Jumble has run in newspapers since 1954: four scrambled words, with circled letters from each feeding a final pun (its history is summarised on Wikipedia). This solves the first part, and it does so in a way that is worth understanding, because the obvious method does not work.
Why it does not try every arrangement
The intuitive approach is to generate every rearrangement of your letters and check each one. That collapses immediately: six letters give 720 arrangements, eight give 40,320, and ten give 3,628,800. A phone would stall long before you finished a puzzle.
Instead the solver never permutes anything. It reduces your letters to a count of each letter — the signature of the multiset — then makes a single pass through the dictionary, keeping any word whose own letter counts fit inside yours. Comparing two small tallies is trivial work, and doing it once per dictionary entry is fast even across a list this size. The cost grows with the dictionary, not with your letter count, which is exactly the right way round.
Why the results are ordered as they are
A jumble’s answer always uses every letter, so full-length results are placed first. The shorter words beneath are not padding: the second stage of the puzzle takes circled letters from several solved words and rearranges them into a phrase, and seeing what those letters can form is often what unlocks it.
The wildcard
A ? relaxes one position in the comparison, so a word matches if it fits your fixed letters plus any single extra. That is why a smudged character costs you nothing, and why the result list grows when you add one — you have asked a broader question.
Where it runs
The dictionary loads once into your browser and the matching happens on your own machine. There is no request per solve, which is why answers are instant after the first load and why the tool keeps working if your connection drops.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why do I get short words as well as the answer?
Because a jumble’s answer uses every letter, so it appears first, and the shorter words follow. Those are useful for the second stage of the puzzle, where circled letters from several answers combine into a final phrase.
What does the ? wildcard do?
It stands in for any one letter you cannot read. Use it when print is smudged or a photo is unclear, and the solver will consider every possibility for that position.
How is this different from the Anagram Solver?
This returns words of every length down to two letters. The Anagram Solver returns only words that use every single letter you typed. Use this one for a jumble, that one when you specifically want true anagrams.
Why do some results look like words nobody uses?
The dictionary is a word-game lexicon, so it includes entries that are valid in play but rare in speech. It contains no abbreviations or proper nouns. Tick Everyday words only to narrow the list to words in ordinary use.
Does it handle proper nouns?
No. Names, places and brands are excluded from the dictionary, so a puzzle built on one will not resolve. That is uncommon in a standard daily jumble.
Is there a letter limit?
Twenty characters, which comfortably covers any newspaper jumble. Longer strings would produce a list too large to read usefully anyway.