Word Sieve

Every word your letters make, highest scoring first

Type your letters; every word they make, ranked by points, highest first.

Up to 15 characters. Use ? for a blank, at most two. A blank tile is worth nothing under these values, so a word marked ? plays for less than the number shown.

The standard letter values this page ranks with:

The word index is not loaded yet. It ships as 14 plain-text shards, one per word length, totalling 3,203,788 bytes; a rack pulls only the shards it can reach, and the figure for your rack appears here after a score.

What is measured

What is measured. Two things, in order. First, which entries of the word list can be spelled with the letters you typed, each letter used no more times than you typed it. That is the unscrambler's search, run on the same index. Second, what each of those words scores, added up letter by letter in the page. The list is ranked by that sum, highest first, and ties go to the longer word, then to alphabetical order. Points never change for how common a word is, but the list is split: words in a common-word pool (provenance) come first, and the valid but rare ones sit in a fold under them, each part still in points order. 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.

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. The index is split by word length, and a rack loads only the lengths it can reach. Those shards are fetched after the page loads, which keeps them out of the page's weight, and the bytes your rack pulled are printed under the results. The letter values live in one table in the site's solver module. The table on this page is drawn from it, so the values you read are the values the sort used.

What it cannot tell you. Proper nouns, hyphenated forms and inflections coined since the list was compiled are not in the list. The 4,272 entries of 16 letters or more sit in the shipped file, outside the index, because no 15-character rack can reach them.

Questions

How is each word scored?
A word's score is the sum of its letters under the standard letter values: a, e, i, l, n, o, r, s, t and u are worth 1, and the awkward q and z are worth 10. Nothing here knows your board, so premium squares, the bonus for laying every tile and where your opponent has played are not counted.
What does the bar beside each word mean?
It shows the word's score as a share of the highest score in that answer, in twenty steps. The top word's bar is full, and a word worth half as much gets a bar half as long. Bars round up to the next step, so read the exact score from the number beside the bar.
Why isn't the longest word the highest scoring?
Because letters are worth different amounts. From the rack QUARTZY the top word is the six-letter QUARTZ at 24. Right behind it, the four-letter QUAY scores 16 and beats the five-letter QUART at 14. One heavy letter can outweigh extra length: both words hold the Q, and QUAY's 4-point Y is worth more than QUART's 1-point R and T together. The unscrambler lists the same words longest first; this page ranks them by points.
Will these words and scores match my game?
Sometimes. The values are the standard letter values the common tile games are scored with, not any publisher's list. The words come from Word Sieve's ENABLE1-derived edition, with 39 entries excluded: a public-domain word list of 172,781 entries. Your game may judge words against a tournament list, a proprietary compilation this site does not use and cannot ship. A word found here may be refused by your game, and one your game accepts may be missing from ENABLE1.
Do the letters I type leave my device?
No. The rack is solved and scored in your tab: the page fetches the slices of its word index that your rack can reach, as plain text from this site, and does every lookup and sum 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 sieve

How this word list was made
Racknone typed Top score— Words found— DictionaryENABLE1 · 172,781 words Valuesstandard letter values