Word Scramble — the free anagram game you can play in sixty seconds

A word arrives with its letters shuffled. Put them back in order by tapping the tiles, or just type it if you are at a keyboard. Get it right and the next one appears immediately; get stuck and you can skip, but skipping costs you the seconds you spend deciding. The clock runs for sixty seconds and your score is the number of words you recovered.

The difficulty is tied to how well you are doing rather than to a menu: you start on four-letter words, and as your score climbs the game moves you up to five, six and finally seven letters. A good run therefore gets visibly harder in front of you. Free, no download, and it works with a thumb on a phone or the keyboard on a desktop.

How to play

• Tap the scrambled letters in the right order, or type them on a keyboard.
• The answer checks itself the moment the last letter lands — there is no submit button.
• Clear takes the tiles back; Backspace does the same one letter at a time.
• Skip is free but the clock keeps running, so it is only free if you are quick about it.
• Words grow from 4 letters to 7 as your score rises.

How people actually solve anagrams — and how to get faster at it

Nobody solves an anagram by working through permutations. Seven letters have 5,040 arrangements and you find the word in about two seconds, so whatever your brain is doing, it is not searching that space. What it does instead is constrain: it looks for chunks that English allows and quietly discards the thousands of orderings that English does not. TH, CH, ST and QU are almost always intact. A lone Q is followed by U. Two vowels in a row is common; four consonants in a row, in English, is nearly impossible.

The practical version of that is to rebuild the word from its ends. Endings carry more information than beginnings: spotting -ING, -TION, -EST, -ERS or a plural S usually fixes three or four letters at once and leaves you a two-letter problem. Beginnings are next — a scrambled set holding S, T and R very often opens STR-. What almost never works is staring at the middle.

There is one more trick worth knowing, and it is a real finding from psychology labs rather than folklore: physically rearranging the letters helps more than thinking harder does. People solve anagrams measurably faster when they can move the letters around than when they must do it in their head, because shuffling breaks the wrong grouping you have accidentally locked onto. That is exactly what the tiles here are for — when a word will not come, put three letters down in any order and look again. You are not guessing; you are clearing the bad chunk your visual system latched onto and letting it try a different one.

More games

More word games: Daily Word, Word Search, or the Typing Test. Or browse all games.