Reverse the letters of each word but keep the word order

How to use reverse each word

1. Type or paste into Your text.
2. Leave Keep punctuation in place ticked so commas, full stops and quote marks stay at the edges of words. Untick it to reverse every character of each chunk.
3. Copy the result.

What it does and when to use it

Reversing the letters of each word scrambles text in a way that is still easy to decode, because the word lengths and the sentence shape stay the same. It is popular for:

• Puzzles and games. Write clues or secret messages for an escape room, a treasure hunt or a class quiz.
• Reading practice. Reading backwards words slows the eye down and makes learners focus on each letter.
• Palindrome hunting. Words that come out the same, such as “level” or “racecar”, are palindromes. Confirm a whole phrase with the palindrome checker.
• Testing software. Make dummy text with real word lengths but no real words, to check a layout without the reader getting distracted by meaning.

For other playful transformations, try pig Latin or space between letters.

How it works

The tool finds each chunk of text between spaces, tabs or line breaks. For each chunk:

1. With Keep punctuation in place, it sets aside any punctuation and symbols at the start and at the end.
2. It splits the middle part into characters as you see them on screen (grapheme clusters).
3. It reverses that list and puts the set-aside punctuation back at the front and the end.

With the option off, step 1 is skipped and the whole chunk is reversed. The white space between chunks is never touched. The processing happens in your browser.

Worked examples

These outputs come from the tool’s own function.

A greeting. “Hello world, friend!” gives olleH dlrow, dneirf!. The comma and the exclamation mark stayed at the ends of their words.

Punctuation reversed too. “Hello world!” with Keep punctuation in place unticked gives olleH !dlrow.

Quotes, brackets and an apostrophe. "Quick" (brown) fox's tail... gives "kciuQ" (nworb) s'xof liat.... The quote marks, brackets and dots stayed put; the apostrophe moved with the letters.

Palindromes. “racecar level noon” comes back unchanged as racecar level noon.

Limits and tips

• Capital letters move with their letters, so “Hello” becomes “olleH” with the capital at the end. Use the case converter afterwards if you want normal capitals.
• Hyphenated words are one chunk: “well-known” becomes “nwonk-llew”.