About
WordUntangle started from a simple annoyance: most word-finder sites bury the actual tool under pop-ups, autoplay video, and a wall of ads before you can type a single letter. We wanted something you could open, use in five seconds, and close — no account, no app install, no email capture.
WordUntangle takes the letters you type — from a Scrabble rack, a Wordscapes level, or a stuck anagram — and matches them instantly against a dictionary of hundreds of thousands of words, right in your browser. It supports wildcards for blank tiles, filters for prefixes and suffixes, Scrabble-style scoring, and a companion tool that scrambles real words back into puzzles for worksheets or games.
The whole tool is a single self-contained page. When you load it, your browser downloads a public word-list file and does all the matching locally using JavaScript — there's no backend server processing your searches, no database logging what you type, and no account system to maintain. That's a deliberate choice: it makes the tool faster, and it means there's simply nowhere for your letters to go except your own screen.
WordUntangle is built and maintained by Dana Kessler, a longtime Scrabble club player who got tired of word-finder sites burying the tool under pop-ups and started building a cleaner version as a side project. It's a solo effort, updated based on player feedback rather than a content calendar — if a word list is missing something or a filter behaves oddly, that's usually the fastest way to get it fixed.
The site is supported by a small amount of advertising, which is what keeps it free and account-free for you to use — see the Privacy Policy for exactly how that works.
Beyond the tool itself, there are a couple of reference guides worth a look: the complete 2 and 3-letter word list, and a breakdown of how Scrabble scoring actually works.
Found a bug, have a feature request, or just want to say the two-letter-word list saved your game night? Visit the Contact page.