Scrabble Word Finder — The Best Play, Scored on Your Board

Quinvert already has a word unscrambler, and it is the right page for a different person: somebody holding letters and no board — a jumble in a newspaper, a crossword clue, a rack before the first move — who wants every real word those letters can spell. It sorts by letter score, and for that question its numbers are correct.

This page is for the other half of the evening. You are mid-game, there is a specific gap on the board, there is an S sitting at the end of a word somebody else played, and two of the squares you would cover are coloured. "Which words can these letters make" does not answer that, because the answer depends on the board and not on the letters. If you have no board in front of you, the unscrambler is the better page and this one will just ask you questions you cannot answer.

Nothing, and that is the single most common error in this category of tool. A blank can be played as any letter, so a finder that treats it as the letter it stands for reports a score the board will never give you. QUARTZ is a twenty-four-point word; QUARTZ played with a blank standing in for the Q is fourteen, because the Q on the board is a blank and blanks score zero for the rest of the game.

That ten-point gap is not a rounding difference — it is the difference between a play being worth making and not. This page scores the blank at zero, and it goes further: when the same letter is needed twice and you only hold one of it, the blank is put on whichever of the two squares is worth less. Hold one E, need two, and one of them lands on a triple-letter square: the real E goes on the triple and the blank takes the plain square. `test/scrabble-tools.test.ts` proves that choice against the alternative rather than against a number somebody picked.

Letter premiums multiply the tile that lands on them; word premiums multiply the whole word once every letter has been counted, including letters that were already on the board. Two word premiums under one play multiply together, so a word across two double-word squares is worth four times its face value. The fifty-point bonus is added after all of that, never before — a common enough slip that there is a test asserting seven points doubled plus fifty is sixty-four rather than fifty-seven doubled.

The rule that gets missed: a premium square is spent by whoever covers it first. If you are hanging your word off a letter already on the board and that letter happens to sit on a triple-word square, the triple is gone — it was used by the play that put the tile there. This page scores an occupied square at its face value with no multiplier, which is why the score it reports for a hook play is lower than a tool that reads the board colours and applies them regardless. Lower and right.

After the opening move, almost nothing is played from the rack alone. You find a letter already down and build through it — which means the word contains a letter your rack does not have to supply. That is the input no rack-based finder can express: asking for a word containing T while also requiring your letters to spell it is a contradiction, and it is exactly the contradiction that makes a general unscrambler the wrong tool once the board has anything on it.

Here you describe the run of squares you are playing into and type the board letters into the squares they occupy. The rack pays only for the empty ones. A three-square line reading T, empty, empty with AP on your rack finds TAP and lays two tiles, and the bonus arithmetic knows it laid two rather than three — which matters, because seven tiles laid is fifty points and six is not.

Laying all seven tiles in one move is worth fifty points on top of whatever the word scores. It is usually the largest single number available in a game and it is why a rack full of one-point letters is often better than one full of high ones — seven common letters can be emptied and a J, X and Q usually cannot.

The bonus counts tiles laid, not letters in the word, and this is where a hook quietly costs you. An eight-letter word built through a letter already on the board uses seven of your tiles and earns the bonus; a seven-letter word built through one uses six and does not, even though the word is the same length as a bonus-scoring play from an empty rack. The tool counts the tiles rather than the letters, so the bonus appears exactly when the board would award it.

It scores the word you lay down and nothing else. Real play often forms extra words at right angles where your new tiles touch existing ones, and each of those scores separately, with the premium squares under your new tiles counting again for each. Those cross-words are not counted here, so on a crowded board the score shown is a floor rather than the whole answer.

It also cannot know whether a letter already on the board was itself played as a blank — nothing on the board records that once the tile is down — so an occupied square is scored at its letter's face value. And it does not hold the fifteen-by-fifteen premium layout: you tell it which squares under the play are coloured, because reading them off the board in front of you takes five seconds and typing an entire game state takes five minutes. Each of these is a deliberate stop, and naming them is the difference between a floor you can reason about and a number you cannot.

Results come from the ENABLE word list — 172,823 English words released into the public domain. The tournament lists a serious player would recognise, NWL in North America and CSW elsewhere, are maintained commercially under terms that do not permit redistribution, so this page does not use them and does not claim to. ENABLE was for years the list Words With Friends itself shipped, and it remains the standard unencumbered foundation for word-game software, but a word appearing here is not a ruling about what any tournament accepts.

In practice the lists overlap heavily and disagree at the edges, mostly over short obscure words and recent additions. If you are playing at a club or in a rated game, the list on the table is the authority and this one is a search tool. If you are playing at the kitchen table, the difference will not come up.

Quinvert has no connection to Hasbro, to Mattel, or to anyone who publishes the game. "Scrabble" is a registered trademark — Hasbro's in the United States and Canada, Mattel's in the rest of the world — and it appears on this page only to say what the tool is for, which is the ordinary way of naming the thing a tool works with. Nothing here is the game, reproduces the board, or is endorsed by its owners.

The tile values and the tile distribution are a different matter and are used freely: they are numeric facts about how a well-known game is set up, published and reused across independent word-game software for decades, not the expressive content a copyright protects. `LICENSES.md` records that reasoning in full, along with why the word list on this page is not called a Scrabble dictionary.

No dictionary loads when this page does. Pressing Find plays fetches one plain-text file — the words of exactly the length you set, 184 KB at seven letters — and every search after that reuses what is already in memory. The matching and the scoring run in your own tab.

The whole-list scan was measured rather than assumed: 10.1 milliseconds at eight letters, the slowest case, against the 200-millisecond budget this site holds itself to for interaction. That is why there is no "searching" state and no cap on how many words are considered — the answer arrives in the same frame as the button press. It also means no rack you type is uploaded, and the network panel during a search is the way to confirm that rather than a claim to take on trust.