Anagram & Palindrome Checker

An anagram rearranges the letters of a word or phrase into another: listen and silent, dormitory and dirty room. A palindrome reads the same backwards: level, racecar, “A man, a plan, a canal: Panama”. Both are easy to get almost right and annoyingly hard to verify by eye in longer phrases. This tool checks them exactly and tells you what is off.

How anagrams are compared

The checker counts the letters in each phrase and compares the counts. Spaces, punctuation and capital letters are ignored, as they are in crosswords and word games, so “Dormitory” and “Dirty room!” compare by their letters alone. Accented letters count as their plain letter by default, so é and e match; turn on “Accents matter” for languages where accents make different letters.

When it is not an anagram

Instead of a plain no, you see which letters are left over: the letters that appear more often in the first phrase, and those that appear more often in the second. If the first list shows an s, the second phrase needs one more s or the first one less. That makes it easy to fix a near-anagram, which is how most good anagrams are found.

Palindromes

Switch to the palindrome check and type a word, phrase or sentence. The letter check removes everything except letters and digits, lowercases them and compares them with their reverse; the panel shows the cleaned letters forwards and backwards so you can spot where they differ. A second check looks for word palindromes, sentences whose words read the same in both directions, such as “Fall leaves after leaves fall”.

Uses

Crossword and cryptic-clue solvers verify anagram answers. Writers test pen names and character names made from their own, a classic literary device. Teachers use anagrams and palindromes for spelling and vocabulary practice, and speechwriters check a palindrome before relying on it in front of an audience.

Famous examples to try

“Eleven plus two” and “twelve plus one” are anagrams that are also equal. “Astronomer” is an anagram of “moon starer”. “Never odd or even” and “Was it a car or a cat I saw?” are palindromes. Load them into the checker to see the letter counts.

Private

The checks run in your browser.

A worked example

Enter “The eyes” and “They see”. Both have the letters e, e, e, h, s, t, y once spaces are ignored, so the checker confirms an anagram of seven letters. Change the second phrase to “They sea” and the result switches to “Not an anagram”, listing e as only in the first phrase and a as only in the second, which tells you exactly which letter to swap. For a palindrome, “Step on no pets” passes the letter check, and the comparison panel shows steponnopets forwards and backwards, identical in both directions.

Accents and other languages

With accents ignored, “Côté” and “tecô” compare as the same letters c, e, o and t, which suits word games where accents are optional. Spanish ñ is a letter of its own in Spanish games, but with accents ignored it counts as n; switch on “Accents matter” when a game treats such letters separately. Letters of any alphabet, including Cyrillic and Greek, are compared the same way.

Related tools

Reverse any text with Reverse Text, check whether a sentence uses every letter with the Pangram Checker, avoid letters with the Lipogram Checker, or count letters and words with the Word Counter.