You never know when you will have to unscramble words. Maybe you are playing games like Scrabble, and you are trying to make words out of scrambled letters that seem to be giving you way more J & W tiles than you’d like. Perhaps you need a memorable password you can use in a web browser that is based on a term that would be far too easy to guess. Maybe you are just curious. Whatever the reason, a word unscrambler can be a very useful way to figure out some valid words from a pile of letters, whether it is for Scrabble, Words with Friends, some other word game, or just to satisfy your own interests.
A Word Unscrambler, also sometimes called a “Word Finder,” works just like a search engine. Spear & Sons Limited intended for Scrabble to be played at a board, but these days everybody has a mobile device in their pocket, so heading to an Unscrambler site isn’t hard. All you need to do is enter the letters into the search field and start the search, and you’ll be presented with word lists telling you exactly what those letters can make. Some will also tell you the definitions.
The best part about a good wordfinder is that it will separate the words you get into different amounts of letters: for example, let’s say your Words with Friends game needs you to make words out of the letters EBANS. Instead of having to ask yourself, “what words can I make with these letters?” or “is this word with these letters going to be the correct spelling?” you can use a words finder to take the letters and form them into words.
In this example, the tool might show you all the five-letter combinations first, which would be BEANS, BASEN, BANES, and NABES. Then, you’ll get the four-letter word options, like BEAN, BENS, BASE, SANE, SEAN, and so on. Below that would be the three-letter words such as ABS, SEA… this means that you can go straight for words that fit into a certain size range, which is useful in plenty of word games.
Some people would consider a word finder cheating, but it really depends on how you look at the game. Being able to find words from letters is technically a skill, but it also depends on knowledge of different word meanings and letter combinations. There are two camps on the issue, as you’d expect:
To some people, a word scramble and word unscramble game is based on your ability to react to dozens of different possibilities and identify when you can combine letters to create words. For some games, this is quite a large part of the experience, so taking away the skill and knowledge involved in finding words can make it feel hollow.
Any word scramble game, from Scrabble to Words with Friends, is going to be unbalanced because of this: you might not be a native English speaker or might just not be as well-versed in the English language. By putting everybody on the same playing field, effort becomes more important.