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Anagram generator

Type a phrase. Tick the words you want scrambled. You get a puzzle you can print, with the answers underneath.

How to use it

1. Type or paste your phrase into the box. A name, a birthday message, a line from a poem, this week's spelling words — anything with words in it.
2. Tick the words you want scrambled. Words of four to eight letters start ticked, five of them at most, because that is about as many blanks as a phrase can carry before it stops being readable. Change any of it.
3. Press ↻ on a word to scramble it a different way without disturbing the others. Some jumbles are kinder than others and it is worth a couple of rolls.
4. Print it, or copy it as plain text to paste into a card, an email or a document. The answers print on the same sheet unless you fold them off.

The puzzle updates as you type. There is no Generate button because there is nothing to wait for — the scrambling happens in your browser.

What an anagram actually is

An anagram is a word or phrase made by rearranging all the letters of another one, using every letter exactly once and adding none. LISTEN and SILENT are anagrams of each other. So are THE EYES and THEY SEE, which is the kind that people remember, because a good anagram is not just a rearrangement — it is a rearrangement that means something.

Rearranging the letters into nonsense, which is what this page does on purpose, has its own name: a jumble or a word scramble. That is the puzzle form. The solver's job is to put the letters back, and the fact that the answer is a real word they half-recognise is what makes it satisfying rather than impossible.

The two get muddled constantly, including by tools that call themselves anagram makers. It matters here only because it tells you what to expect from this page: give it words and it gives you back scrambled letters. It does not go looking for a clever hidden phrase inside your name.

Making a puzzle people can actually solve

Leave enough of the sentence standing

The unscrambled words are the clues. A phrase with two words showing and nine scrambled is not harder, it is just unsolvable — there is nothing to reason from. Scrambling three to five words out of a dozen is the sweet spot, which is why that is the default here.

Watch out for words that scramble to themselves

Short words and words with repeated letters have very few arrangements. TOO has three, one of which is TOO. This page will not offer you a word under three letters or one made of a single repeated letter, and it never hands back a jumble identical to the answer — but a four-letter word is still nearly free to solve. Scramble the long ones.

Some jumbles accidentally spell something else

Scramble TEAM and you may get MEAT. That is a fine puzzle and a terrible one depending on the sentence around it. Press ↻ if a jumble reads as a real word that fits the gap.

Keep the capitals out of it

Every jumble is shown in capitals so that a scrambled proper noun does not give itself away by keeping its capital letter. If you are writing the sheet out by hand, do the same.

Read it aloud before you print it

The one test that catches everything: if you cannot work out your own puzzle from the words that are left, nobody else will either.

What people make with this

Name puzzles. Scramble the letters of a name on a place card, a party invitation or a classroom door. Long names give the most to work with.

Spelling practice. A scrambled spelling list is the same words the class already has, in a form that requires actually looking at the letters. Teachers have used word scrambles for this for about as long as there have been spelling lists.

Cards and messages. Scramble two or three words of a birthday message so it has to be solved before it can be read.

Puzzle sheets for a group. Print one per person. It costs nothing and it does not need a screen, which matters more than it sounds — see the large-print puzzles if the sheet is going somewhere the print size matters.

A quiet five minutes. Which is what the rest of this site is for.

Common questions

Is this an anagram solver? Can it unscramble letters for me?

No, and we would rather say so than let you find out after typing. This page makes puzzles; it does not solve them. Give it words and it scrambles them. It cannot take a pile of loose letters and tell you which dictionary words they spell, and it cannot find a clever hidden phrase inside your name.

Those are genuinely different tools and there are plenty of good free ones. We have not built one because doing it properly means shipping a large dictionary to your browser, and the version that would be quick to build is the version that returns a wall of words nobody wanted. If that is what you came for, this is not the page — no hard feelings.

Does it work with names and proper nouns?

Yes. Punctuation, apostrophes and hyphens stay where they are; only the letters move. A hyphenated name is treated as one word.

Will the same phrase always scramble the same way?

Yes, unless you press ↻. The scrambling is deterministic, so a sheet you print today and the same phrase typed next month give you the same puzzle. That is deliberate — it means you can rebuild a sheet you have lost.

Is anything I type sent to a server?

No. It is scrambled in your browser and it stays there. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is logged, and the page keeps working with your network disconnected once it has loaded.

Why are some words greyed out?

A word needs at least three letters and at least two different letters before scrambling it means anything — there is no second arrangement of AAA. Those words are shown so you can see the whole phrase, but they cannot be ticked.

Is it free?

Yes, with no account, no limit and no catch. It exists because we built one for ourselves first.

There is a daily version of this

If you like unscrambling more than you like writing puzzles, the Anagram Ladder is a new one every morning: a short saying with five of its words scrambled, and you climb it a rung at a time. It uses the same scrambler this page does. It is free, there is no sign-up, and it takes about two minutes.