Worked examples

Example 1: a basic rack, no blanks

Type CARTS into the rack field. The finder checks every word from 3 up to 5 letters (the size of your rack) that can be spelled using a subset of C, A, R, T, S, with each letter used at most once since none of them repeat in the rack. Among the matches: CAT (score 5), CAR (score 5), CART (score 6), CARS (score 6), RATS (score 4), and CARTS itself (score 7, using all five tiles). Notice that shorter words appear alongside the full-rack word in the same list: you never have to use every letter, and the tool never assumes you will.

Example 2: a rack with a repeated letter

Type APPLE. There are two Ps here, so any matching word can use up to two Ps, but a word needing three would still fail to match (there's no third P available). APE (score 5), PAL (score 5), LEAP (score 6), and APPLE itself (score 9) all match. A word like APPAL would need two As and two Ps. Since the rack only has one A, it correctly does not appear, which is a useful check on how the matcher counts letters rather than just checking whether each individual letter is "present somewhere" in the rack.

Example 3: using a blank tile, and how its score works

Type ZO? (Z, O, and one wildcard). ZOO matches: the rack has one real O, and the wildcard covers the second O the word needs. Click it and check the score: it shows 11, not the 12 a plain add-up of Z(10)+O(1)+O(1) would give. That's because the second O in this specific match was supplied by the blank, and a real Scrabble blank always scores 0 points no matter which letter it's standing in for. The finder works out, for every match, exactly which letter occurrences (if any) had to come from a wildcard, and zeroes out only those occurrences. The letters your rack actually had score normally.

Now try ZOO with no wildcard at all (three real letters: Z, O, O). ZOO still matches, but this time the score shows the full 12, because every letter in the word came from a real tile, not a blank.

Example 4: a long rack and the filters

Type REGULATIONS (11 letters, no wildcards). This returns a large results list spanning many word lengths, from short 3-letter words up to long ones that use most of the rack. Open Advanced filters and set Exact length to 7. The list now shows only 7-letter matches, useful if you have exactly seven empty squares to fill on the board. Clear that and instead set Starts with to RE. Now every remaining result begins with those two letters, useful when you're building off an "RE" already sitting on the board. Filters can be combined: adding Contains as AT on top of the starts-with filter narrows the list further to words that both start with RE and include AT somewhere in the middle.

Example 5: sorting the same rack three ways

Type STATION and try each sort mode in turn. Score puts your highest-value plays first: useful when you just want the best points available right now. Length puts your longest words first: the fastest way to spot whether a 7-letter bingo (and its 50-point bonus) is on the table before you look at anything else. A–Z is purely alphabetical, which is the quickest mode for scanning past a rack you've already searched to double-check whether one specific word you have in mind is actually valid.

Example 6: a rack that returns nothing

Type QVWXJZ (six high-value consonants, no vowels or common letters, and no wildcards). The finder correctly returns 0 matches. This isn't a bug or a dictionary gap, there genuinely isn't a 3-to-15-letter English word buildable from only those six letters with no vowel and no wildcard. This is a good rack to remember if you ever want to double-check that the tool reports "no matches" honestly instead of forcing a result: add a single wildcard (QVWXJ?) and try again, and a handful of short words appear once the blank fills the gap.

Example 7: spotting a bingo on a full 7-tile rack

Type PAINTER, a full 7-letter rack with no wildcards. Switch to the Length sort first, before looking at score: three 7-letter words appear that use every tile at once: PAINTER, PERTAIN, and REPAINT, each scoring 9 from letter values alone. Any one of them, played across all seven rack squares in a single turn, would earn the 50-point bingo bonus on top of that 9, for 59 points total from the word itself before any board multipliers are even counted. Switch back to Score sort and the top of the list is a 6-letter word instead ("ENTRAP" or "PANTIE", both scoring 8), a reminder that the single highest-scoring word in a list isn't always the best play once a bonus like a bingo is on the table, which is exactly why the Length sort exists as a separate view rather than folding bonus math into the score column. Every example above runs entirely in your own browser: the rack you type is never sent to a server to produce these results, see the privacy page for the full detail.