How to unscramble words

Don't try to see the whole word at once. Take the letters apart in a fixed order: endings first, then the letter pairs that like to stay together, then the first letter. Done in that order, a seven-letter scramble turns into a three- or four-letter puzzle very quickly.

The steps below use the same word list as our unscrambler, 172,823 words, so the percentages are real counts, not guesses.

1. Look for an ending

A huge share of English words end in a handful of letter groups. In our dictionary, 38% of words end in S, 8% in -ED and 7% in -ING. If your letters include I, N and G, set those three aside and work on what's left. Same for E and D, or E and R.

Take TGNIRSA. There's an I, an N and a G, so pull out -ING. That leaves T, R, S, A. Now try them in front of -ING. STAR-ING works, and so does RAT-INGS once the S moves to the end. The letters spell RATINGS and STARING (plus the rarer GASTRIN and GRATINS).

Endings worth checking, roughly in order: -S, -ED, -ING, -ER, -EST, -LY (4% of words), -TION and -NESS. Start with the longest one your letters allow.

2. Pair up the consonants

Some letters almost always travel together. TH, CH, SH, PH and WH make one sound, so treat each as a single tile. ST, TR, BL, CR and the like are common at the start of a word. Others, like TL, DM or GK, never start one, which rules out a lot of guesses.

The most common letter pairs inside English words are ES, IN, ER, TI, TE, RE. If you have the letters for one of them, try it first.

In CCAHTER, a C, the T and the H can form -TCH-, a common chunk (CATCH, WITCH, FETCH). That gives CAT-CH-ER, or CATCHER, the only word these letters make.

3. Put Q with U

If there's a Q, there's almost certainly a U next to it: 99% of the words in our list that contain Q have a U right after it. The few exceptions (QAT, QAID, FAQIR, TRANQ) come up mostly in Scrabble. Lock QU together and you're down a letter.

4. Choose the first letter

With the ending and pairs set aside, try likely first letters. More English words start with S than any other letter (11% of our list), then C and P. Vowels in the middle, consonants on the outside is a good default shape for short words.

A trick from crossword and Jumble solvers: write the letters in a circle instead of a row. The order you wrote them in stops suggesting fake words, and real ones are easier to spot.

5. Count the vowels

Five or six letters with only one vowel usually means a short, consonant-heavy word or a Y doing vowel work (RHYTHM, GLYPH, CRYPT). Lots of vowels, say four in seven letters, points to a longer word with vowel pairs like EA, IO or OU. It's a quick check that tells you what kind of word to look for.

When one set of letters makes several words

Some scrambles have more than one answer, and no method can tell you which one a puzzle wants. SINETLA spells 7 words: SALIENT, ENTAILS, ELASTIN, SALTINE, SLAINTE, NAILSET, TENAILS. In a newspaper Jumble the cartoon clue decides. In Scrabble, take the one that scores best on the board.

That's also when a tool earns its keep. Type the letters into the word unscrambler to see every word, or use the anagram solver if you only want words that use all of them. About 15% of the words in our list are everyday words, so switch on "Common only" if the results look full of oddities.

Practice

The method gets fast with repetition. The word scramble game gives you a fresh set of scrambles by topic every day, with a timer if you want to race. To make scrambles for someone else, try the word scrambler.