What an anagram is and how to solve them fast
What exactly an anagram is, English examples you can check letter by letter, and a concrete method for untangling scrambled letters in seconds instead of minutes.
An anagram is a word made by rearranging all the letters of another one, using each letter exactly once. EARTH and HEART are anagrams: both have an A, an E, an H, an R and a T.
As a puzzle, the game runs the other way: you are handed the letters scrambled and you have to find the original word. And there almost everybody does the same thing — stares at the letters waiting for the word to appear — when there is a method that works considerably better.
English examples, checkable letter by letter
- E, I, L, N, S, T →
LISTEN,SILENT,ENLIST,TINSEL. Six letters and four words. The most quoted anagram in English, and deservedly so. - A, E, G, L, N →
ANGEL,ANGLE,GLEAN. - O, P, S, T →
STOP,POTS,TOPS,SPOT,POST,OPTS. Six words from four letters: the perfect illustration of why short words are not necessarily the easiest ones. There are too many valid exits. - A, C, E, R →
RACE,CARE,ACRE. - A, E, H, R, T →
HEART,EARTH,HATER.
One note on rules: most anagram games ignore capitals and accents, and differ on whether proper nouns count. It is worth a glance at the rules of whatever you are playing, because it changes the answer more often than you would expect.
Anagrams have been used for centuries as a hidden signature: authors published under pseudonyms that were anagrams of their own names, and in seventeenth-century science they were a way of claiming priority for a discovery without revealing it yet. Robert Hooke published his law of elasticity in 1676 as a meaningless string of letters and only unscrambled it two years later.
The method: do not look for the word, look for the skeleton
Three steps, and none of them involves staring.
1. Split vowels and consonants
Write the letters in two groups. With GNARSET:
- Vowels: A, E
- Consonants: G, N, R, S, T
That alone tells you a lot. Two vowels for five consonants in seven letters means the consonants have to be grouped: English cannot spread five consonants around two vowels without clustering them.
2. Look for the consonant clusters English allows
English permits far more consonant runs than most languages, but they are still a short list. Look at yours and ask which combinations are possible:
- At the start:
BL,BR,CL,CR,DR,FL,FR,GL,GR,PL,PR,SL,SM,SN,SP,ST,SW,TR,TW,TH,SH,CH, and the three-letterSTR,SPR,SCR,THR,SHR. - At the end:
-NG,-NK,-ND,-NT,-CK,-ST,-LD,-MP,-SH,-CH,-TH.
In GNARSET the STR at the start jumps out, and so does NG at the end. That collapses the search space enormously: instead of seven loose letters you now have two blocks (STR and NG) and two vowels to place around them.
3. Try the blocks in the positions the language allows
NG cannot open an English word, so if NG is in there, it goes at the end or in the middle. STR can only go at the start.
With STR at the front and NG near the back, there are barely three arrangements left. STR + A + NG + E gives STRANGE. Check it: S, T, R, A, N, G, E. Exactly the seven letters you started with. Solved.
Notice that the real work was done by step 2: the moment you have blocks instead of loose letters, three or four placements remain and you can run through them in your head.
The shortcut that saves the most time: prefixes and suffixes
Before wrestling with the middle of the word, check whether the letters can make a typical English ending:
-ING, -TION, -MENT, -NESS, -ABLE, -IBLE, -LESS, -FUL, -EST, -ER, -LY
Or a prefix: UN-, RE-, IN-, DIS-, MIS-, PRE-, SUB-, OVER-.
If a long anagram shows you a loose T, I, O and N, there is a good chance the word ends in -TION. Set them aside and what remains is a much smaller problem. CANOTIRE, for instance: pull out T, I, O, N and you are left with C, A, R, E — and REAC + TION is REACTION. Same with -ING: the moment you spot I, N and G, what is left is usually a recognisable verb.
Other tricks that work
Rewrite the letters in a different order. It sounds absurd and it is one of the most effective things you can do: the brain anchors to the order in which it first sees the letters. Writing them in a circle, or alphabetically, breaks that anchor and the word often surfaces on its own.
Start from the rare letters. If there is a J, a Q, an X, a Z, a K or a W, anchor the word there. The options shrink drastically because those letters only appear in a few positions. And a Q is a gift: it is virtually always followed by a U, so you get a two-letter block for free.
Count the letters before you begin. With five letters or fewer, mental trial and error is fast and the formal method is unnecessary. With eight or more, you will not get there without hunting for suffixes.
Do not rule out proper nouns if the game allows them.
Why they are worth practising
Anagrams train something quite specific: holding several items in working memory while you reorganise them. It is the same mechanism you use to deduce a half-finished word in a crossword, which is why people who play both notice one helping the other.
A word on expectations, though: getting better at anagrams makes you better at anagrams, and somewhat better at similar tasks. If you want to know what is actually established about the effects of puzzles beyond the puzzle itself, we cover it without exaggeration in this article.
Practise without hunting for word lists
MenteBrillante has a new anagram every day, with difficulty that rises as you solve, and a training mode with back-to-back rounds for when you want to do ten in a row. Free in the browser.