Two words are anagrams if you can rearrange the letters of one to make the other. “Listen” and “silent”. “Evil” and “vile”. “The eyes” and “they see”. Each letter must be used exactly as many times in one as in the other, with nothing left over and nothing missing.
Enter the first word or phrase on the first line, and the words to compare on the lines beneath it. The tool checks every one of them against the first and tells you which ones match.
How the check works
Each text is reduced to its letters and digits, put in order, and compared. If two texts produce the same sorted string, they are anagrams. “Listen” becomes “eilnst”, and so does “silent”. “Google” becomes “eggloo”, which does not.
By default, case, spaces and punctuation are ignored, which is how phrase anagrams are judged: “Dormitory” and “dirty room” are a classic pair, and so is “Astronomer” with “moon starer”. Untick the options for a strict test, in which spaces and capitals must also match, which tends to make most phrase pairs fail.
Accented letters are treated as separate letters, so “école” and “ecole” are not anagrams, because é and e are different characters. Remove accents first with the accent remover if you want to treat them alike.
Checking several at once
Everything below the first line is compared to it, so you can test a whole list of candidates in one go, which is useful in word games: put the target letters in line one, the guesses beneath, and read down the Yes and No column. The tool does not do the reverse job of finding every anagram of a word, because that needs a dictionary. It tells you whether the words you have supplied are valid rearrangements.
Why people care
Word games like Scrabble, Wordle and crosswords depend on spotting anagrams. Puzzle setters hide names inside phrases. Teachers use them in spelling lessons. Genealogists and writers have used anagrams as pen names, and many a detective story has an anagram clue.
For a quick sense of what letters a text contains, the character counter lists the most common ones, and the palindrome checker checks a different property of words. If you want to see a word backwards, there is the text reverser.
An old habit of writers and scientists
Anagrams have been used to hide things as well as to entertain. In 1610 Galileo sent Kepler a jumbled sentence to claim a discovery about Saturn without giving the details away, and unscrambling it later proved he had been first. For everyday play, anagram skill is mostly about spotting common letter groups such as “ing”, “tion” and “er” and moving them around. If you are stuck in a word game, write the letters in a circle, because the written order tends to lock your mind into one arrangement.