Anagram Checker
Check whether two words or phrases are anagrams of each other.
Compare Strings
String A Letters: 0String B Letters: 0
How anagram checking works
Two strings are anagrams if they contain exactly the same letters in any order, ignoring case, spaces, and punctuation. The simplest algorithm strips non-letters, lowercases both strings, sorts their characters, and compares — if the sorted arrays match, they're anagrams. Classic examples include listen / silent, astronomer / moon starer, and the Morse code / here come dots. For related tools, try the Palindrome Checker or Letter Counter.
Built and maintained by Meet Shah · Last updated
What this tool is used for
- Settling whether two words really use the same letters for a puzzle or a game.
- Checking a proposed anagram before publishing it in a crossword clue.
- Verifying a word-game answer against the letters available.
- Comparing two phrases while ignoring spaces and punctuation.
- Testing an implementation against a known pair of anagrams.
Frequently Asked Questions
- How is an anagram detected?
- By normalising both strings — lowercase, strip spaces and punctuation — then comparing sorted characters or letter-frequency maps. The frequency-map method is O(n) against sorting's O(n log n), and matters on long phrases.
- Do spaces and punctuation matter?
- By convention no. "Dormitory" and "dirty room" is a classic anagram precisely because the space is ignored. A checker comparing raw strings rejects nearly every real example.
- What about accented letters?
- A genuine judgement call. Unicode NFD lets you compare base letters and treat é as e, but in languages where the accent marks a distinct letter, folding them makes false matches. State the rule rather than assuming.
- What is a perfect or antigram anagram?
- A perfect anagram uses every letter exactly once with no leftovers. An antigram is an anagram meaning the opposite — "restful" and "fluster", or "funeral" and "real fun" — which is a wordplay category rather than a different test.
- Is a word an anagram of itself?
- Trivially yes by the letter test, which is why most checkers reject identical input explicitly. Whether that is correct depends on your purpose — for puzzle validation it is a degenerate case worth rejecting.
- How is the comparison done efficiently?
- By normalising and sorting the letters of each string, or by comparing letter counts. Sorting makes the check a single string comparison, which is why the canonical form is also what anagram dictionaries index on.
- Do the two words need to be real words?
- Not for the check — it is purely a letter test, so any two strings with the same multiset qualify. Whether the result is a meaningful anagram is a dictionary question the letter comparison cannot answer.
Common errors and gotchas
- Comparing with spaces and punctuation included, which fails almost every phrase anagram.
- Comparing case-sensitively, so a capitalised word never matches its lower-case anagram.
- Counting a repeated letter once, which turns a multiset comparison into a set comparison.
- Assuming accented characters match their base letters, which they do not without normalising.
- Treating an identical word as an anagram of itself, which most definitions exclude.
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