Anagram Pairs

Every tile on the board is four letters in a jumbled order, and every tile has exactly one partner: another jumble of the same four letters. Six real English words are hidden that way, two tiles each. Pair them all before the tries run out. No tile spells a real word, so there is nothing to recognise and nothing to remember — the only thing that works is putting each tile's letters in order and comparing what comes out.

It runs entirely on your device: 0 network requests, works offline. No ads, no account, nothing to buy, and no betting, money or prizes of any kind.

1. Read the board. Twelve tiles, four across and three down. Under each one is KEY plus a letter — the first letter of that tile's sorted key. Two tiles can only be partners if their sorted keys are identical, so a different key letter rules a tile out immediately.
2. Focus the board — click it, or press Tab until it is outlined.
3. Move with the arrow keys or WASD. The cursor clamps at the edges rather than wrapping, and a sideways move never changes your row.
4. Hold a tile with Enter or Space. It is marked ▲ HELD, and the line under the board tells you its letters in order — that is the key you are hunting for.
5. Press its partner. Move to another tile and press Enter again. If the two are made of the same letters they lock together with a ✓ and the word they spell is revealed. If they are not, both are marked ✗ TRIED, you are shown the two keys side by side, and it costs one try.
6. Changed your mind? Press Esc or Backspace, or press the held tile again, to put it back. That is free — only a wrong pairing costs anything. Pressing a tile that is already paired off is free too.
7. Match all six pairs before the tries run out. Spare tries are worth points, so a clean board scores higher than a lucky one.

How can you tell if two words are anagrams of each other?

Put both into a canonical form and compare the forms, rather than comparing the words. For letters, the canonical form is the letters in alphabetical order: LIPS becomes ILPS, SLIP becomes ILPS, and because those match the two words are anagrams. It works because sorting throws away the one thing anagrams disagree about — the order — while keeping everything they must agree about, which is how many of each letter there are. Two consequences are worth knowing. First, you have to count repeats: EELS and ELSE are anagrams, but EELS and SEED are not, because EELS has two E's and SEED has two E's and a D. Second, sorting is what makes the comparison fast; checking every rearrangement of a four-letter word means up to twenty-four comparisons, while sorting both and comparing once is a single glance. Programmers group anagrams the same way, by using the sorted string as a dictionary key, and this game is that idea made physical — which is why the board shows you the first letter of each tile's key for free and leaves the rest to you.

Is every board really pairable?

Yes, and it is guaranteed by how the board is built rather than checked afterwards. Six words are chosen first, from this site's own list of 1292 common four-letter words, and each one contributes exactly two tiles — so a perfect pairing exists before anything is shuffled. The six are also required to have different letters as a multiset, which is the part that matters: it means no tile from one pair can ever match a tile from another, so there is exactly one right answer and never an accidental second one. A separate solver, which never looks at how the board was made, re-groups the finished tiles by their sorted letters on every seed in the test suite and has to find six groups of two. If it ever found a group of one or three, the build fails.

Why does none of the tiles spell a real word?

Because a tile that spelled a word would give the game away. You would look for the real word, then hunt for its letters somewhere else on the board, and you would never have to compare two jumbles at all. Every arrangement that happens to be a real word is filtered out before a tile can be dealt, so the only strategy left is the one worth practising. It also means the word revealed when a pair locks together is genuinely new information rather than something that was already sitting on the board.

How many wrong pairings do I get?

Between three and seven, and the number is not arbitrary — it is computed from how confusable your particular board is. After the tiles are dealt, the solver counts how many pairs of tiles share three of their four letters. Those are the near misses that actually fool people, and the more of them there are the more tries you are given, up to seven. A board of obviously different tiles gets the floor of three. The game deliberately picks six words that share letters, because six unrelated words pair themselves at a glance and teach nothing.

Is there any money, betting or in-app purchase in this?

None, and there never will be. No currency, no prizes, nothing to buy, no lives to refill and no money involved at any point. It is a word puzzle that runs on your own device.

Can I play it with a keyboard or a screen reader?

Both, with the same rules — there is no drag, no swipe and no timing anywhere in it. Arrows move, Enter holds and pairs, Esc puts a tile back. Every tile is a real button whose spoken label spells its letters out one at a time, so a jumble is never mispronounced as a word, and says which letter its key starts with. The live region reads the pairs left, the tries left and the result of your last pairing after every move. Held tiles say ▲ HELD, matched ones carry a ✓ and the word they made, and a pairing that failed marks both tiles ✗ TRIED — so nothing on the board depends on telling colours apart.

Does it work offline?

Yes. Once the page has loaded once, the whole game is on your device — the word list, the generator, the solver that groups the tiles, and the scoring. Nothing is fetched while you play, and there is no server involved at any point.

Four-letter words only, drawn from this site's list of 1292 common English words, so an obscure word you know may not be in it. Every board is six pairs and twelve tiles, and the try budget runs from three to seven depending on how alike the tiles are. Words that are anagrams of each other — CARE, RACE and ACRE — count as one group, and only one of them can appear on a board, because two of them would make a tile ambiguous. There is no timer, no daily streak to protect and no hint button: the key letter under each tile is the hint, and it is always on.

Anagram Rush is the same idea pointed the other way — you are given four letters and have to find every real word they spell, rather than matching two jumbles of them. Word Hunt hides six words in a letter grid and rewards careful reading over recall. Word Weave crosses two four-letter words at a single shared square and asks you to fill the blanks. Word Ladder turns one word into another a single letter at a time.

Bookmark this page (Ctrl+D, or ⌘D on Mac) or install the app — it works offline the next time you need it.