Word Scramble

The clock measures, it does not threaten

Timed word games of the download era mostly worked the other way round: a bar drained, and when it emptied your round was over whether you had the word or not. That design turns a vocabulary puzzle into a reaction test, and it punishes the one behaviour that actually solves scrambles, which is sitting still and staring at the letters. The timer here has no value it is counting towards. It starts when the ten rounds finish building, it keeps running through hints and skips, and it is still running while you read this. Its only job is to give you a number to beat next time.

If you want that number to mean something, run the ten rounds without touching Hint. A hinted round is quicker and scores less, so a fast time with hints in it and a fast time without are not the same run and should not be compared.

That clock is the only one in this wing. The anagram game deals five-letter words and the anagram puzzle deals six and up, both untimed, and both holding one length steady for all ten rounds. This is the board that takes the whole list instead, which makes it the only one where you cannot tell how long the next word is until it arrives, and the only one where the tray changes size between rounds.

How an arrangement gets chosen

Scrambling by shuffling and showing whatever comes out is how a scramble ends up spelling something. Every candidate here is tested first, against two conditions: it must not be any accepted answer for those letters, and it must not leave more than one letter sitting in the position it started in, a cap that loosens to two on the single eight-letter word in the pool and nowhere else. Up to two hundred random shuffles are tried against that test. If none passes, the engine stops guessing and walks the arrangements in alphabetical order until one does, and if that still fails it walks them a second time with the letters-in-place condition dropped and the condition about not spelling an answer left standing.

The bound on the random pass is the interesting part. A word whose letters repeat may have only a handful of distinct arrangements, and several of those may themselves be listed words; a shuffler that retries at random until it succeeds would spin forever on one of them, with the tab locked up and nothing on screen to explain why. Two hundred tries and then an exhaustive walk either finds an arrangement or proves that none exists.

Repeated letters change the arithmetic

Five distinct letters can be arranged 120 ways and six can be arranged 720, so a longer tray ought to be a bigger search. Repeats are why it frequently is not. LEVEL never gets its 120: swapping its two Ls changes nothing and swapping its two Es changes nothing, so it has 30 distinct arrangements, and the walk steps through the distinct ones only instead of testing the same string four times over. MIRROR is a letter longer and its three Rs cut 720 down to 120, which is a five-letter search wearing a six-letter tray. TATTOO comes out at 60, and ERROR, the smallest on the whole list, at 20.

What changed when this board stopped dealing five letters every round is that a repeat stopped being the minority case. 549 of the 1,419 words here repeat a letter and 211 of those set the pair side by side, but the rate is the part worth knowing: 170 of the 662 words at five letters, about one in four, against 347 of the 701 at six, which is essentially half, and 32 of the 55 at seven. The longer the word the tiles spell, the likelier it carries a double – so a doubled letter is not the oddity it is on a five-letter board, and the biggest tray you get here is not reliably the biggest problem on it.

The tiles cope with that by tracking position rather than letter. A tray holding two Ls holds two separate tiles that happen to read the same, so clicking the second one moves the second one, and typing L twice moves them in the order you typed. A board that tracks its tiles by letter takes the wrong L about half the time, and the symptom is a tile that is visibly back in the tray and invisibly still in your answer.

Where the words come from

1,419 words running from five letters to eight – 662 of them five, 701 six, 55 seven and a single eight – British spelling throughout, no proper nouns, and no plural made by bolting an S onto another word, because an anagram whose answer is a shorter word plus S is not worth the ten seconds. It lives in the same shared word file the word search elsewhere on this site draws its themed lists from, so what counts as a word is settled in one place instead of once per game. That is also why a rejected guess is told it is not a word on this list rather than that it is not a word: LEAST and SLATE are both here and both accepted, but a perfectly good English word that never made the list would be turned down, and the message ought to be honest about which of the two things happened.

Getting through ten rounds faster

Type rather than click. The letters leave the tray in the order you name them and there is no aiming involved, which is most of the time saved. When you stall, Shuffle again rearranges the tray, and it is worth more than it sounds: a word that is invisible in one arrangement is often obvious in the next, and the re-shuffle goes back through the same test, so it cannot hand you the answer by accident. Clear returns everything you placed and lets you begin the word again. If it will not come at all, Skip costs you the round’s points but shows you every word those letters spell, which is how the list gets into your head for the next time it comes round.