Anagram checker — do two phrases use exactly the same letters?

How to use the Anagram Checker

1. Type the first word or phrase into First word or phrase.
2. Type the second into Second word or phrase.
3. Read the verdict in Anagrams: Yes or No, with the letter count for each side.
4. Look at Sorted letters to compare the two sides at a glance. When the answer is No, the lines Only in the first and Only in the second show exactly which letters are spare.

What it does and when to use it

An anagram rearranges every letter of one phrase to make another, using each letter exactly as many times as it appears. “Listen” and “silent” are a short pair; “Astronomer” and “Moon starer” is a longer one.

The checker is handy when you:

• write or solve crossword clues, word games or puzzle hunts;
• invent a pen name or brand name from your own name;
• teach spelling, where seeing the sorted letters makes the idea clear;
• test a long phrase you have built, where a single missing letter is hard to spot by eye.

The leftover letters are the most useful part. When you are building a phrase, they tell you what you still need to use or remove. For a single text that reads the same backwards, use the Palindrome Checker. To compare letter counts in a longer text, try Letter Frequency.

How it works

Each phrase is cleaned the same way. Accents are stripped (é becomes e), letters are lowercased, and anything that is not a letter or digit is removed. The remaining characters are sorted into alphabetical order. If both sorted strings are identical, the phrases are anagrams.

When they differ, the tool counts each character on both sides. A letter that appears more often in the first phrase is listed under Only in the first, once for each extra copy, and the same for the second. It all happens in your browser.

Worked examples

A classic pair. “Astronomer” and “Moon starer” both reduce to the sorted string aemnoorrst, 10 letters each, so the result is Anagrams: Yes. The space in “Moon starer” is ignored.

Close, but not quite. “Listen” (6 letters) and “Silence” (7 letters) give No. The checker shows Only in the first: t and Only in the second: ce. Swap the t for a c and an e and the letters would match.

Accents ignored. “Café” and “face” both become acef, so Sorted letters shows acef on both lines and the answer is Yes.

Limits and tips

• Letters from non-Latin scripts are compared too, but accent removal only applies where Unicode splits a letter from its mark.
• To count how many letters a phrase has before you start, use the Character Counter.