How to Unscramble Letters in Your Head
While you may never be as good as a computer at unscrambling an anagram of random letters, there are some easy tricks you can practice to get better at it. While there are many reasons you might want to learn this, we’ll use Scrabble as an obvious example.
Identify the chunks
When playing the game (or the alternative Words With Friends), you’re presented with seven random letters to turn into a word. If you see them as just seven random letters, you will get overwhelmed quickly. Instead, like all complex problems, you should break it down into pieces to make things easier.
If you can make even a small “partial word,” even just a pair of letters, you’re reducing your variables from seven to five or fewer. Spelling out a single small “sound” that makes sense goes a long way.
Imagine you find the sound “ACK.” You can combine that sound with single letters to make a larger chunk you can work with. SACK, RACK, TACK, all begin with very common letters. You can also find PACK and WACK with less common letters.
Combine the chunks
If you separate the chunk out from the rest, you might be able to find a second chunk. SN is a common sound, and WR is common in writing. With just those examples, you get SNACK and WRACK, using five of your seven letters.
If you can make a new chunk from letters already on the board, you might be able to combine it with your other word chunks to make an even bigger word. So let’s say you also have the chunk “NOW,” which is a fine word by itself, but there’s an S on the board. Your chunk now becomes SNOW. If you have a chunk that fits on that, you might be able to use all of your letters for a bingo. SNOW and PACK make SNOWPACK, as shown here using the board solver from wordswithfriendscheat.io:
The lesson here is, don’t just stop when you find a small word! Combine individual sounds until you have much larger — and higher scoring — plays.
Common endings
Even when you think you have a pretty good word, you’re not done. Almost everything in English has a plural. Do you have an S? An ES? You get more points for free. Even the ubiquitous “QI” can become QIS.
That’s not all. Keep in your mind a bunch of small chunks that can quickly modify your words in fun ways. What can you do with an AE? MINUTE and MINUTIA can become MINUTIAE. RETINA becomes RETINAE.
English is also full of irregular plurals. CHILD can become CHILDREN with incidental letters. VES can often change words that end with F sounds. KNIFE becomes KNIVES. LEAVES. LOAVES. HALVES. You get the picture.
Keep going!
And now you know how the pros get massive words. The more you practice, the faster you’ll get, and the more you’ll get a feel for which words and word chunks lead to the highest scores. Stay at it, and good luck!
Then again, sometimes there are just no words for something.