Free tool

Word Finder — Rack Letters, Blanks and Board Hooks

Enter the tiles you are holding — ? for a blank — and get every word the lexicon says you can build, scored and sorted. It also shows the leave: what stays on your rack afterwards, which is the half of the decision most word finders omit.

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Runs entirely in your browser. Nothing is uploaded, stored, or sent anywhere.

What it does

You give it the tiles you are holding. It returns every word in the lexicon those tiles can actually build, scored with the standard English tile values and sorted so the highest scorer is at the top. A ? in the rack is a blank: it becomes any letter, and like a real blank it scores zero — which is why the highest-scoring word is frequently not the longest one.

The leave is the column most finders do not show

Nearly every free word finder gives you a list of words and a score. That is half the decision. What matters almost as much is the leave — the tiles still on your rack after you play. Dumping five tiles for 22 points and keeping QVW is usually a worse turn than taking 18 and keeping AENRT, because the second rack will score again next turn and the first one will not. This tool shows the leave for every candidate, so you can weigh the two against each other instead of reading score alone.

Board hooks and patterns

Racks are not played in a vacuum. The board hook field takes one letter already on the board and requires the word to use it. That letter is free — it does not come out of your rack, and it is excluded from the leave — and any word that cannot use it is dropped. That is the difference between “what could I play in principle” and “what can I actually place here.”

The pattern field handles the tighter case, where you are playing into a fixed slot. Write ..a.e for a five-letter space with an a in the third position and an e in the fifth. Dots are positions you must fill; letters are already fixed.

Which dictionary this uses, and why it matters

This tool uses ENABLE, a public-domain lexicon of 172,823 words. It is not the official tournament list. The North American OWL/TWL is published by Merriam-Webster and the international list by Collins; both are copyrighted, both are licensed, and neither is reproduced here. The overlap is high but not total, so a word this tool accepts could still be challenged off the board at a club, and a handful of valid tournament words are missing. If you are playing competitively, adjudicate with the list your event actually uses.

Scoring, and what it deliberately leaves out

The score shown is the plain sum of the tile values, with blanks counted as zero. It does not include premium squares — no double letter, no triple word, and no 50-point bonus for playing all seven tiles — because those depend on where on the board you place the word, which this tool cannot know. Treat the score as a ranking of the words against each other, not as the number you will write on the score sheet.

In a real game the premium square usually dominates anyway: a 14-point word reaching a triple word score beats a 26-point word on plain squares. The ranking here is the input to that decision, not a substitute for it.

Standard English tile values

1 – A E I O U L N S T R · 2 – D G · 3 – B C M P · 4 – F H V W Y · 5 – K · 8 – J X · 10 – Q Z · blank – 0

Notes

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