Word Sieve

Every word that uses all your letters, and every pair that splits them

Every letter, used once: one-word anagrams, plus every two-word split.

Up to 15 letters, and every one gets used. Blanks (?) do not work here; the unscrambler takes them.

The word index is not loaded yet. It ships as 14 plain-text shards, one per word length; a single word pulls one, a split pulls the short ones, and your rack's figure appears here after a sieve.

What is measured

What is measured. Which entries of the word list use exactly your letters, no letter more or fewer, and which pairs of entries share those letters between them. Nothing is scored. Single words in a common-word pool (provenance) come first, with the valid but rare ones in a fold under them, and pairs of two common words come before pairs that hold a rare one. Words of 2 letters, or of 8 and more, have no pool and are never folded. The pool lists base forms, so a plain plural or -s form of a pooled word (retains, from retain) counts as common here too. The strip counts the single words and the pairs. Splits tried counts the ways the search dealt your letters into two halves; a deal whose halves are both words pairs every word of one half with every word of the other, so one deal can yield several pairs.

How it is kept. The list ships as a plain text file, wordlist/enable1.txt. Before publication it is turned into an anagram-key index: each word's letters are sorted, and that sorted key leads to every word spelled with the same letters. Your rack, sorted, is a key, so a single-word anagram takes one lookup: the letters of SPARE sort to aeprs, which leads to the 12 words in ENABLE1 that share it. A two-word split does that lookup once per half, for every distinct way the rack deals into two hands, and keeps a pair only when both halves are words.

What it cannot tell you. Whether your game allows a word, which depends on a word list this site does not use and cannot ship. Proper nouns and hyphenated forms are not in the list. The 4,272 entries of 16 letters or more sit in the shipped file, outside the index. The search looks for one-word and two-word answers only, so an anagram of three or more words is not found.

Questions

How is this different from the word unscrambler?
The unscrambler lists every word you can build from some or all of your letters. This page keeps only the words that use all of them, each as many times as you typed it. Type LISTEN into both: the unscrambler also lists the shorter words inside it, while this page finds the 6 words that are anagrams of the whole rack and the 43 ways those six letters split into two words.
Can I use a blank, the way the unscrambler does?
No. An anagram uses every letter you typed and nothing else, so a blank has nothing to stand for here. Type a “?” and the page stops with a message asking you to remove it.
Why do the two-word answers stop at 12 letters?
To limit how much of the index one question downloads. A single-word anagram pulls one slice of the index, the slice for your rack's length. A split can put anywhere from 2 letters to all but 2 in either half, so the sieve loads every slice a half could land in: a 12-letter rack already pulls lengths 2 through 10. Past 12 letters a split would fetch most of the index, so the split search stops and names the cap.
It found nothing. Is it broken?
Almost certainly not. When no word uses exactly your letters, the page says so, names the dictionary and gives the number of anagram keys it searched; the split search does the same with the number of splits it tried. QZJXV gets both answers. If the index fails to load, the page says that instead, so a failed download never reads as “no words”.
Do the letters I type leave my device?
No. The rack is solved in your tab: the page fetches the slices of its word index your rack can reach, as plain text files from this site, and does every lookup locally. The site's Content-Security-Policy limits connections to its own origin, so your browser blocks any request that would carry your letters somewhere else before it is made.

The rest of the site

How this word list was made
Racknone typed Anagrams— Two-word pairs— Splits tried— DictionaryENABLE1 · 172,781 words