How to unscramble words
and solve anagrams quickly.

An anagram is hard for one main reason: your eye keeps reading the letters as the word they are arranged in. Every technique below is a way of breaking that pattern and searching the letters systematically instead of staring at them. Try them in order on the example DAERB, then on a longer one.

1. Break the shape

Write the letters in a circle, or in a different order from the one given. The point is to stop seeing the given sequence. Put DAERB in a circle and BREAD, BEARD, BARED and DEBAR all become visible within a few seconds; the clue (“a food made by baking dough”) picks BREAD.

2. Separate vowels and consonants

Count them. Five letters with two vowels almost always follow a consonant–vowel pattern such as CVCVC, CCVVC or CVCCV. DAERB has A and E as vowels and D, R, B as consonants. English rarely starts a word with DB or RB, so the opening consonant pair is BR or DR, or a vowel sits between them. BR-EA-D and BE-AR-D fall out immediately. Doing the count first turns a search of 120 arrangements into a search of about ten.

3. Look for common endings first

If the letters contain I-N-G, E-D, E-R, L-Y, T-I-O-N or M-E-N-T, park that ending and solve the rest. DORMITORY minus the letters of “DIRTY” leaves ROOM: DIRTY ROOM. ASTRONOMER contains M-O-O-N and S-T-A-R-E-R: MOON STARER. Endings shrink the problem.

4. Place the rare letters

Q is followed by U. X, Z and J go in a small number of positions. V never ends an English word. If you have a K, it is probably next to a vowel or after C or S. Fix the awkward letter first and the rest arranges itself around it.

5. Use the clue as a constraint, not an afterthought

In Brisk and most crossword anagrams, the clue tells you the part of speech and the meaning. “Showing courage” is an adjective, so the answer probably ends in a common adjective pattern. Generate candidates from the clue first, then check the letters. It is much faster than generating from letters and checking against meaning.

6. Rotate pairs, not single letters

When stuck, do not shuffle randomly. Take the first two letters and try each of the others after them: DA-, DE-, DR-, DB-. Discard the impossible ones instantly. Then move to the next pair. This is slower than insight but it always finishes, and insight usually arrives partway through.

Practise in the right dose

Anagram skill is mostly vocabulary plus habit, and both respond to small daily practice better than occasional long sessions. Brisk gives you one five-letter anagram with a clue every day as part of the word puzzle of the day. When you want to check what you missed, the anagram solver lists every word a set of letters can make. Use it after you have tried, not instead.