The Anagrun wiki
Anagrams: meaning, examples and a method to solve them
An anagram is a word made by rearranging the letters of another word, with none added and none left out: heart and earth, listen and silent, weather and wreathe. The same goes for whole phrases, and a word can have several anagrams at once.
On Neurostim, Anagrun gives you ten words with their letters mixed to put back in order against the clock, in English or French, including the daily anagrams, the same for everyone. Anagrun is a game, not an anagram solver: it will not find words for you, and this page teaches you to find them yourself, using what we measured on its lists.
In short
- Genre: a single-player word game against the clock.
- Goal: work out ten common words from their mixed letters.
- One game: two words of 5 letters, three of 6, three of 7 and two of 8, so 65 letters, always in that order.
- Words of the day: the same for everyone in each language, renewed at midnight, Paris time. Only your first try of the day is ranked.
- Free run: ten new words every game, and your best time of the day is ranked.
- A stubborn word: you can pass it, at the cost of 20 seconds added to your time.
- Accents: they do not count, so ecole is accepted for the French école.
- Account: none to create; you play under a guest name.
- Devices: computer with a keyboard, phone or tablet by tapping the tiles.
The rules of anagrams and of Anagrun
What makes an anagram
Two words are anagrams if they use exactly the same letters, each the same number of times. French Wikipedia gives carte and écart as an example, but only calls an anagram "perfect" if it respects accents too. An anagram can also work on a whole phrase: "Tom Marvolo Riddle" gives "I am Lord Voldemort".
One answer per word
Each draw expects one single word. If you type a different anagram, even a real word, it is not accepted and the clock keeps running. The measurement below shows how many words on the list have one.
The clock and passed words
The clock starts when the words appear and runs on the server: leaving the page does not stop it. It stops when every word is found or passed. A passed word counts as found and adds 20 seconds to your time; with equal times, whoever passed fewer words comes first, then whoever finished first.
The mix
The letters never spell the word itself, and at most half of them stay in place. The game shows them in capitals and without accents.
Solving an anagram: the method
Why random attempts fail
A 5-letter word has only about a hundred arrangements, but an 8-letter word has over 20,000 on average in English. Nobody can run through those. You look for pieces of words instead, and the language narrows the choice for you.
Start from the end
The last letter is the most predictable one. In the English list, E, Y, T, R and N cover 59.8% of word endings between them, and E alone covers 16.5%. If there is a Y among the tiles, try it at the end first. Then test the common endings: -ER, -LE, -ET, -ON, -NG, then -ING, -TER, -KET, -ARD.
Build groups
Group letters that belong together before you think about the whole word. Some groups are almost automatic:
- Q is followed by U in every word of the list, without exception: 9 out of 9.
- H follows C, S, T or G in 68.8% of cases, so look for CH, SH, TH and GH.
- CK ends 2.1% of the words, and -KET another 1.7%.
Here is an example. These are the tiles:
You see C and K, so CK. You see E and T, so perhaps -ET at the end. That leaves T and I, which go at the front. The diagram shows the split, with the three pieces separated by a line:
Look for double letters
In the English list, 54.8% of words have a repeated letter, and 27.1% have one doubled side by side, so about half of them. Two identical consonants, like TT or LL, sit together 44% of the time: try them together first. Two identical vowels do so only 25% of the time.
Do not trust the order of the tiles
Only about one tile in six is already in its place. Their order therefore does not help, and it can make you read false word beginnings. Do not read the tiles from left to right. Treat them as a little pile of letters, and start with the rare consonants, which have few possible places.
When to pass
The time you have already lost is gone. The only question is whether you will need more than 20 more seconds. If you have no lead at all, pass. If you hold a good piece of the word, carry on. You cannot return to a passed word, so decide once and for all.
Getting faster
- Warm up before your first try of the day. Two or three free runs get you going, and the ranked try cannot be replayed.
- Only start the words of the day when you have time. The clock runs on the server, even if you close the page.
- Do not stop at an unusual word. Many other anagrams are rare forms, like inapt for paint or tyros for story. The list is made of common words, so look for something simpler.
- Type accurately. There are 65 letters to write in every game, and the keyboard takes its share of the clock. If that is where you lose time, Typerun trains exactly that.
- Say it under your breath. This is advice, not a measured result: sounding out a group of letters often tells you whether a word exists.
- Let words come back. Two games drawn in a row share at least one word in 18% of cases: the more you play, the more words you recognise, even mixed differently.
For a change, Spanrun, on digits, and Memo Chars, on symbols, are memory games.
Benchmarks: what Anagrun's lists say
Letters and word endings
These figures come from the game's real lists, read in November 2026. All words are taken without their accents, as in the game.
| French | English | |
|---|---|---|
| Words in the list | 515 | 520 |
| Words with an accent or cedilla | 75, or 14.6% | none |
| Share of vowels, Y included | 45.4% | 38.0% |
| Most common letters | E 15.4%, A 8.8%, R 8.4%, O 7.6% | E 9.6%, A 8.1%, O 7.5%, R 7.2% |
| First letter | C 17.1%, P 11.7%, B 9.3%, M 8.5% | S 14.2%, C 11.3%, P 10.2%, B 7.9% |
| Last letter | E 46.6%, R 15.0%, N 10.7%, T 8.2% | E 16.5%, Y 12.1%, T 10.6%, R 10.4% |
| Two-letter endings | ER 8.5%, RE 8.2%, ON 6.6%, TE 5.8% | ER 7.7%, LE 5.0%, ET 4.2%, ON 3.8% |
| Three-letter endings | EAU 4.1%, TTE 3.5%, LLE 3.3%, CHE 2.9% | ING 2.9%, TER 2.1%, KET 1.7%, ARD 1.5% |
| Words with a repeated letter | 61.2% | 54.8% |
| Words with a letter doubled side by side | 19.6% | 27.1% |
The two languages do not play alike. In French, a final E is almost a reflex, with 46.6% of words, whereas in English it covers only one word in six and final Y comes right behind it. Long endings weigh little here because the words are short: -TION appears in 3 English words out of 520 and -MENT in none, and in 1 and 2 French words out of 515.
How many arrangements
The average number of different ways to order the letters of a word on the list, repeated letters taken into account.
| Letters | French | English | With no repeated letter |
|---|---|---|---|
| 5 | 100 | 104 | 120 |
| 6 | 483 | 486 | 720 |
| 7 | 2,884 | 3,007 | 5,040 |
| 8 | 15,254 | 20,916 | 40,320 |
Going from 5 to 8 letters multiplies the choice by about 200 in English and 150 in French. Repeated letters, more frequent in French words, bring those numbers down sharply.
Words with several anagrams
For each word on the lists, we looked for another form with the same letters, accents removed and proper nouns left out, in Debian's free dictionaries: 32,822 forms of 5 to 8 letters in English and 85,619 in French, conjugations included.
| French | English | |
|---|---|---|
| Words with at least one other anagram | 102 out of 515, or 19.8% | 18 out of 520, or 3.5% |
| Among 5-letter words | 16.7% | 7.3% |
| Among 8-letter words | 22.0% | 2.0% |
So one French word in five has at least one other form in the dictionary: énorme also gives morène, piano gives opina, assiette gives satiétés. In English, weather gives wreathe and paint gives inapt. These figures measure dictionaries, not what a player thinks of typing: they count rare forms such as chapt or nopai, and the French dictionary, full of conjugations, is more than twice the size of the English one. So they do not mean French has five times more anagrams than English, and the risk of a dead end in play is probably lower. In any case, the game only accepts the word on its list.
How the tiles are mixed
Across 4,000 games drawn by the game's generator in November 2026, so 40,000 mixes per language:
| Letters | Already in place on average, French | Same in English |
|---|---|---|
| 5 | 0.88 | 0.87 |
| 6 | 1.13 | 1.17 |
| 7 | 1.21 | 1.19 |
| 8 | 1.39 | 1.28 |
The first tile is the real first letter in 14 to 19% of cases, and the same goes for the last one, which stays close to plain chance. So the tiles offer no shortcut.
Records
We know of no world record for this format, and the time depends on the words drawn. To compare yourself on the same words as everyone else, look at the daily, weekly and monthly leaderboards.
The history of anagrams
- Antiquity: the invention is credited to the Greek poet Lycophron, in the third century BCE, but that credit rests on an account by John Tzetzes written in the 12th century. The word comes from Greek and means "reversal of letters".
- Middle Ages: the practice spreads across Europe, notably with Guillaume de Machaut.
- French poets: Ronsard plays on Marie and aimer ("to love"): "Il trouveroit aimer : aimez-moi donc, Marie".
- 1589: George Puttenham devotes a passage to the anagram in The Art of English Poesie.
- 17th century: Louis XIII appoints Thomas Billon as Royal Anagrammatist, on 1,200 livres a year. The poet Dryden mocks the pastime as torturing one poor word ten thousand ways.
- 1610 to 1660: scientists publish their discoveries as anagrams, to be revealed later. Galileo does so in 1610, Huygens in 1656 and Hooke in 1660 for his law, ut tensio, sic vis.
- Pen names: Rabelais signs as Alcofribas Nasier, Voltaire may come from AROVET L.I (Arouet le jeune, the younger, with V for U and I for J), Marguerite de Crayencour becomes Marguerite Yourcenar, one C short, Boris Vian becomes Bison ravi. André Breton, for his part, dubs Salvador Dalí "Avida Dollars" to mock him.
- Victorian era: the parlour game Anagrams is said to date from this time, but Wikipedia gives its earliest dates without solid sources.
- 1954: Martin Naydel creates Scramble for the American press, later Jumble, which gives mixed-up words to put in order. It now runs in over 600 newspapers.
The genre also lives on in the longest-word round of the French show Des chiffres et des lettres, in Boggle, and in the Scrabble variant Clabbers. Anagrun takes the form of Jumble, single words to put back in order, and adds a clock and a leaderboard.
Frequently asked questions
What is an anagram?
An anagram is a word or phrase made by rearranging the letters of another word or phrase, using all of them exactly once. Heart and earth are anagrams, as are listen and silent. The word comes from Greek and means "reversal of letters", and the practice is said to go back to the Greek poet Lycophron, in the third century BCE.
What are some examples of anagrams?
Simple examples include heart and earth, listen and silent, weather and wreathe, and paint and inapt. A word can have several at once: listen also gives enlist, inlets and tinsel in the Debian dictionaries we used. In fiction, "Tom Marvolo Riddle" becomes "I am Lord Voldemort".
What is an anagram for heart?
An anagram for heart is earth, and hater uses the same five letters too. Those are the only other forms we found in the Debian dictionaries we used for this page, which hold 32,822 English forms of 5 to 8 letters. All three words use exactly the letters A, E, H, R and T.
How do you solve anagrams quickly?
To solve anagrams quickly, look for a likely ending first, then build groups of letters that belong together, like TH, CK or QU, and fit in the rest. In Anagrun's English list, E, Y, T, R and N cover 59.8% of endings, and Q is always followed by U. Trying positions at random does not work on long words.
How do you solve long anagrams?
Long anagrams need chunks, not attempts: an 8-letter word has over 20,000 arrangements on average in Anagrun's English list. Set aside an ending such as -ER or -ING, join any pair of identical consonants, pick out pairs such as CH or ST, then arrange the few pieces left. You then have three or four blocks to order instead of eight letters.
What are the rules of an anagram game?
In an anagram game, you put mixed letters back in order to find a word. On Anagrun, each game has ten words of 5 to 8 letters, accents do not count, a right word moves on by itself, and a stubborn word can be passed for 20 seconds. Only the word on the game's list is accepted, and the best time wins.
Is Anagrun an anagram solver?
No, Anagrun is a timed game, not an anagram solver: it gives you the letters and times you while you search. A solver or anagram finder does the opposite, listing every word that can be made from a set of letters. Anagrun offers no such tool, and a solution only counts when you find it yourself.
What is an anagram of a name?
An anagram of a name rearranges its letters into another name or phrase, and writers have long used them as pen names. Rabelais signed as Alcofribas Nasier, Marguerite de Crayencour became Marguerite Yourcenar, one C short, and Voltaire may come from AROVET L.I, for Arouet le jeune. They can also mock: André Breton turned Salvador Dalí into "Avida Dollars".
How do you make an anagram?
To make an anagram, write out the letters of your word or name, then look for a short common word inside them, and try to use up what is left. Keep track of each letter, since all must be used exactly once. Not every word has one: only 3.5% of Anagrun's English list has another anagram in the dictionaries we used.
Are anagram games free to play online?
Yes, Anagrun is free, has no ads and plays online with no account to create: your first game gives you a guest name, ranked like members. You can play the words of the day in both languages and play free runs back to back, with nothing to install or download.
Sources
- Wikipedia, Anagram, Jumble and Anagrams (game), checked on 7 November 2026.
- French Wikipedia, Anagramme, checked on 7 November 2026.
- Dictionaries from the Debian packages wfrench 1.2.9 and wbritish and wamerican 2020.12.07, used to count other anagrams.
- Neurostim's measurements: Anagrun's word lists and generator, November 2026.
Your turn
Today's Anagrun challenge is the same for everyone until midnight, Paris time. No account needed: you get a guest name with your first game.
Games of the same kind
This guide also exists as plain text, for AI assistants: markdown version. All the guides of the wiki.