Word scramble
Put the letters back in order. A round has 10 words, and each word has its own clock.
Word scramble is an anagram game: you get the letters of a word in the wrong order and put them back. Here a round has 10 English words, with a clock on each word, and at the end you see how many you solved and how long it took.
How a round works
First you choose a word length. Then the letters of the first word appear as buttons and the clock starts. Tap the letters in the right order, or type them on a keyboard. Tap a placed letter to take it back. As soon as the word is complete and right, you move on. If the clock runs out or you skip, you see the word and it counts as missed.
The three word lengths
Longer words get more time, because there are more letters to try.
| Length | Letters | Words in the list | Seconds per word |
|---|---|---|---|
| Short | 5 to 6 | 13 | 30 |
| Medium | 7 to 9 | 10 | 45 |
| Long | 8 to 13 | 10 | 60 |
Medium and long overlap on purpose. With 30 words there are too few from 10 letters up to fill a round, so long starts at 8 letters. Ephemeral, garrulous and susurrus appear in both.
Where the words come from
These are the 30 real words from our vocabulary test, from garden and window to pusillanimous and tergiversate. The ten made-up words from that test stay out, since an anagram of a word that does not exist has no answer. The split goes by length alone, so it says nothing about how common a word is: that test counts window as an everyday word and lucid as a rare one, though lucid is the shorter of the two.
When a second answer counts
We ran every word against an open English word list of 274,937 entries and looked for other words with the same letters. 12 of the 30 have at least one. Meander has the most, with five, among them renamed. Eager also spells agree, and lucid also spells ludic. All of them count as correct. The game also shuffles again whenever the letters happen to land on a right answer, so a puzzle never starts solved.
How the score works
Your result is the number of words you solved, out of 10, and the total seconds the round took. Your best round is the one with the most words. Between two rounds with the same number of words, the faster one wins. You can share the result as a line of text with a link to this page.
More word games
Hunting for words in a grid is what the word search is for. The spelling test asks how a word is written, and all the games with a score are on the brain games page.
Frequently asked questions
- How do you play word scramble?
- You see the letters of an English word in the wrong order and put them back, by tapping them or by typing. If the word is right, it closes by itself. A round has 10 words, and you can skip a word you do not get.
- What happens if I find a different word with the same letters?
- It counts, as long as it is in our word list. The letters of garden also spell danger and gander, and laconic also spells conical. 12 of the 30 words have such a second answer.
- Will I get the same words again?
- Yes, the list is small. It has 30 words, so medium and long use the same 10 words each time, in a different order and with the letters shuffled again. On short you get 10 of 13.
- Is my score saved?
- Only on your own device: your best round for each word length. Nothing goes to our server, you do not need an account and we do not compare you with other players.