Boggle Solver

How scoring works

• Three and four letters — 1 point.
• Five — 2. Six — 3. Seven — 5. Eight or more — 11.
• Letters must touch, including diagonally, and no square may be used twice in one word.
• The Q die carries Qu, so it contributes two letters at once.

Long words are worth more than lots of short ones

Look at the scoring again: one eight-letter word pays eleven points, which is as much as eleven three-letter words. Most players spend the round sweeping up threes and fours because they are easy to see, and finish with a page of words and a small score. The board almost always holds something long — it is just harder to spot, because long words bend across the grid instead of running in a line.

Where the long ones hide

Two habits find them faster than staring does. First, look for endings rather than beginnings: if there is an S, an -ER, an -ING or an -ED reachable from the middle of the board, work backwards from it. Second, follow the vowels — a chain of letters with no vowel in reach cannot go far, so the paths worth walking are the ones that keep passing near A, E, I, O or U.

The solved list above is grouped by length, longest first, for the same reason: the words at the top are the ones that decide the round.

Common questions

Can a letter be reused in one word? Not the same square. The same letter can appear twice in a word if it appears on two different dice that both touch the path.

Do diagonals count? Yes. Each square touches up to eight neighbours, which is what makes long words possible on a four by four grid at all.

Why is a word I found missing from the list? Either the path does not connect — check that every pair of letters actually touches — or the word is not in the lists we check. Every word above links to its page, where you can see exactly which lists accept it.

Does it handle a five by five board? Enter the letters row by row as they are on your board; the solver walks whatever grid you give it. Only the scoring table above is written for the classic four by four game.

More word tools here

• Scrabble word finder — words from a rack rather than a grid.
• Spelling Bee solver — seven letters, one of them compulsory.
• Word checker — settle an argument about a word.