Scrabble Word Finder & Checker

Player’s guide

Short, practical notes on where Scrabble points are won and lost — how the finder works, why short words matter, blanks, word lists, the bag and swapping. Each part stands on its own: jump to the one you need.

How this word finder works

• We check every possible combination of your letters — nothing is missed.
• Blank tiles are supported. Letters taken by a blank score zero and are marked.
• Up to 15 tiles, which is the most any board game deals.
• Words are grouped by length, longest first, and sorted by points inside each group.
• Best words shows the highest score for the fewest tiles.
• Every word links to its dictionary page, so you can check it before you play it.

Short words are where most of the points actually come from

Bingos are memorable, but a normal game is won on two- and three-letter words played alongside tiles that are already on the board. A two-letter word laid parallel to an existing word scores twice: once for itself, and once for every cross-word it forms. That is why the two-letter list at the top of this page is worth learning by heart — it is a handful of words, and it changes what you can do with a bad rack. A few of them are Collins-only: playing one of those in a tournament under the American list is how a word gets challenged off the board.

What a blank really costs

A blank scores nothing, and it keeps scoring nothing for the rest of the game. Standing in for a one-point vowel that is a fair trade; standing in for Q or Z you are giving up ten points before multipliers, so it is usually worth waiting for a turn where the blank completes a bingo or reaches a triple word square.

In the results above, the letter a blank had to cover is printed in red, so you can see at a glance what the word costs you rather than what it would score with real tiles. Both games hold exactly two blanks in the bag, which is why the search accepts at most two.

Which word list are you playing under?

There is no single “Scrabble dictionary”. The same rack gives different answers depending on the list your game runs, and the difference is not small — a large share of valid words exist in one list and not another. Pick the lists you play under in Advanced search above; the pages below carry the current word counts we hold for each.

• Collins Scrabble Words (CSW) — used for English play in most of the world, and the largest of the four.
• Tournament and Club Word List (TWL) — club and tournament play in the USA, Canada and Thailand.
• Official Scrabble Players Dictionary (OSPD) — the home and school edition, with offensive words removed.
• Words with Friends — Zynga's own list, which matches neither of the others.

Racks that look unplayable usually are not

Two situations account for most “there is nothing here” moments: a rack with no vowels, and a rack with nothing but vowels. English has short words for both cases, and most players never learn them because they never come up in conversation. Type the rack in anyway — if something exists, it is in the results, and if the results are genuinely empty the page says so in those words rather than showing you a blank screen.

If the answer really is nothing worth playing, swapping tiles costs you a turn but fixes the rack. Keeping a rack that cannot make anything costs you several.

What is actually in the bag

A game holds 100 tiles. Of those, 68 are worth a single point, 42 are the vowels A, E, I, O and U, and only 4 tiles in the whole bag score eight or more — the J, Q, X, Z. Two blanks make up the rest.

Read those numbers again and the game changes shape. Most of what you will ever draw is cheap, which means a high score almost never comes from the tiles themselves. It comes from where you put them: a four-point word across a triple word square beats a twenty-point word played flat in the middle of the board, and the difference is not close. Players who chase the heavy tiles spend whole games waiting for a draw that statistically is not coming.

The same numbers explain the racks that feel broken. With that many vowels in the bag, a rack of five of them is not bad luck — it is arithmetic, and it will happen several times a game to somebody. That is what the two- and three-letter lists above are for: they turn a rack you would otherwise swap into a small, certain score.

The fifty-point bonus, and how people actually get it

Using all seven tiles in one turn scores fifty points on top of the word. That single rule is worth more than any heavy tile in the bag, and good players organise their whole turn around keeping the chance alive rather than around scoring now.

What makes a bingo likely is not luck but what you leave behind. After you play, look at the tiles still on your rack: a leave of common letters with one or two vowels is worth several points less this turn and far more next turn. Dumping a duplicate letter for a small score is usually the strongest move on the board, and it never looks like it.

Seven-letter words built on ordinary stems — the ones that combine S, E, R, T, A, I and N — account for most bingos played in real games. That is why they are worth learning as shapes rather than as a list: you are not memorising words, you are learning which leftovers are worth keeping. Type your rack above with a blank and you will see how much wider the field becomes; the results mark which letter the blank had to cover.

Hooks: the one letter that rewrites the board

A hook is a single letter added to a word already on the board to make a different word — the S on the end of CAT, but also the H in front of EAR, or the B in front of RIM. The reason hooks matter is not the hook itself: it is that adding a letter to an existing word lets you lay a whole new word alongside it and score both at once.

This is where two-letter words stop being a curiosity and start being the game. Playing parallel to an existing word forms a cross-word at every point of contact, and each one scores. A five-tile play laid alongside a word already on the board can easily count four or five separate words. Every word page here lists the hooks that word takes, front and back, so you can check before you commit rather than after.

The defensive half matters just as much. A word that takes a hook on a line leading to a triple word square is an invitation, and strong opponents accept it. Before you play into the top or bottom rows, look at what your word lets somebody else extend.

When to swap, and what to keep

Swapping costs a turn and scores nothing, which is why most players do it far too late. The question is not whether your rack is bad; it is whether it will still be bad next turn. A rack with five consonants and no vowel does not fix itself — you will draw one tile, and the odds it rescues you are poor. A rack that is merely dull often fixes itself for free after one small play.

The rule that survives contact with real games: swap when the rack has no play worth more than about the cost of the turn, and keep swapping to a shape rather than to random letters. Return the duplicates and the awkward tiles, keep the letters that combine. Holding a Q with no U and no open I is the classic slow bleed — it costs a little every turn until the bag runs dry and then costs you twenty at the end.

Common questions

Is using a word finder cheating? In a rated tournament game, yes, and it is against the rules of every organised event. In a casual game against a phone opponent who is also using one, it is levelling the field. Most people here are looking a word up after the turn to find out what they missed, which is how you get better at the game.

How do I practise with it without ruining the game? Play your turn first, then type the rack in and compare. The gap between what you found and what was there is the part you learn from, and it disappears the moment you look first. Most of the players who improve fastest use it as a post-mortem, not as an oracle.

Why does the same rack give more words on this site than on my app? Because most apps search only the list they ship with. Here you choose the lists in Advanced search, and by default we search a wide one — so you see words your app would reject and words it would accept but never suggest.

What is a good score? In a casual game between two people who know the two-letter words, three hundred is respectable and four hundred is a good day. Averages mean less than the shape of the game: one bingo and one triple word square can be worth more than ten careful turns.

Why does my opponent's app accept a word this one rejects? Because it is running a different list, or a different edition of the same list. Word lists are revised: words are added and, less often, removed. Each dictionary page above shows which edition we hold and when we last checked it.

Can I search by shape instead of by tiles? Yes. Use the Pattern field in Advanced search, writing an underscore for each unknown letter — for example _ _ s _ _ w _. That searches the whole dictionary by shape, which is what you want for a crossword clue rather than a rack.

Do you show what the words mean? Every result links to its own page, which carries the scores, hooks, anagrams and, where we have one, a definition.

Does this work for Words with Friends? Use the Words with Friends cheat instead — the tile values, the bag and the word list are all different there, so the same rack gives genuinely different advice.

The rest of the site

• Words with Friends cheat — same search, WWF tiles and word list.
• Wordle solver, Spelling Bee solver, crossword solver and Boggle solver.
• Word checker — look a single word up in all four lists at once.
• Letter values, the board and its premium squares, tips that actually change games.