Word Scramble – Play Online for Free

In a word scramble a word has been thoroughly mixed up: its letters lie before you in the wrong order, and you sort them until a real word stands there again. Behind it is the anagram, rearranging the letters of a word, and that game is ancient. The Greek poet Lycophron is said to have turned the name of his king Ptolemy into the words "apo melitos," "from honey." In 1610 Galileo Galilei sent off an observation of Saturn as a seemingly meaningless string of letters, to claim the discovery without giving it away, and Johannes Kepler promptly read something entirely different into it. And in Harry Potter, Tom Marvolo Riddle rearranges the letters of his name into "I am Lord Voldemort."

As a newspaper puzzle the idea took off in the United States: in 1954 the cartoonist Martin Naydel created the Jumble®, first called "Scramble," which today runs in more than 600 newspapers; our Word Scramble has no connection with Tribune Content Agency, which owns the Jumble name. Since 2003 a text has made the rounds online claiming that words stay readable as long as only their first and last letters are right; it is traced back to a doctoral thesis Graham Rawlinson wrote at the University of Nottingham in 1976. That trick will not help you here, because the first and last letters get shuffled too. Every word scramble here is free to solve, needs no account and draws on 20 categories.

From Jumble to Word: Rules and Tricks for Word Scramble

Solving an anagram here means untangling a single word. This is how the game works:

• The task: the category is shown at the top, for example Animals, Tools, Cities or Fairy Tales and Legends. Below it are empty slots for a word of four to ten letters, and under them its letters lie in the wrong order. All lengths come up in a random mix. The shuffle never already spells the answer, and at most one letter in four happens to sit in its own place.
• Placing and taking back: a click or tap on a letter puts it into the first free slot from the left. Click a placed letter and it goes back to its spot in the row below.
• With the keyboard: just type the letters. Backspace takes back the last placed letter, Delete clears all the slots, the space bar shuffles, and after a solve Enter brings up the next word.
• Shuffle and Clear: "Shuffle" mixes up the bottom row again, while letters you have already placed stay where they are. "Clear" brings all placed letters back, except those from a hint.
• Checked automatically: as soon as every slot is filled, the game compares. If the word is wrong, the row shakes and says "Not right yet."; if it is right, it turns green: "Solved, all correct!"
• Hint: a hint puts the right letter into the first slot from the left where it is still missing, in blue and locked in. If a wrong letter sits there, it goes back to the row. After the solve, the message then tells you how many hints you used.
• Clear thanks to the category: within one category no two words share the same letters. HEART and EARTH are made of the same five letters, but you find one under Human Body and the other under Nature and Weather.
• Score and new word: above the word you see Solved, Streak and Best, and every solved word extends your streak, hints or not. Giving up with "New Word" ends it and shows you the answer. If letters are already placed, a hint has been used or a streak is running, the button first asks "Sure?", and only a second click brings the next word. A word only returns after all the others have had their turn, and your progress stays saved in your browser.

With these tricks you will untangle even long words faster:

• Category first, then length: count the letters and run through words of the category with exactly that length. An animal with seven letters narrows the search more than you might think.
• Start at the end: almost every third word in the game ends in E, ER or Y. If you have an E and an R, or a Y, in the row, try them in the last slots first.
• Group the regular pairs: some letters travel together, like CH, SH, TH, CK and NG, or the vowel pairs EA, OO and OU. A Q is always followed by a U here. Grouping these first leaves fewer loose pieces to sort.
• Break long words apart: nine or ten letters often hide a compound word. Spot a familiar piece like FIRE, BOOK or BALL, and the rest usually falls into place quickly.
• Say the syllables: say possible syllables quietly to yourself. English words mostly alternate between consonants and vowels, and whatever cannot be pronounced drops out fast.
• Reshuffle instead of staring: if nothing jumps out, press "Shuffle". A different arrangement often brings out a word that stayed hidden before.
• Ask for the start: if the first slot is still empty or wrong, a single hint reveals exactly the first letter, and with it the word is often half solved.

Hungry for Seconds? Five More Puzzles for Word Jugglers

If you still have an appetite for letters after the last word, here is fresh fare:

• Word Search: the other kind of letter jumble. The words of a chosen category hide in a grid, across, down, on the diagonal and even in reverse.
• Guess the Word: again a word takes shape from letters, only you do not know them beforehand. In six tries green, blue and gray show which letters are right, with words of four to seven letters.
• Word Hive: seven letters sit in a honeycomb, and each word you build from them must contain the letter in the middle.
• Hangman: a word is guessed letter by letter before the gallows is fully drawn, and on the two easier levels a category stands beside it as a hint, just like here.
• Crossword: clues instead of mixed-up letters. Every answer crosses others in the grid, and there too "Check" and "Hint" help you along.