English Anagrams by the Numbers
How many words have an anagram, at what length they hide and which letters help. Everything is counted on the site dictionary, word by word.
How Many Words Have an Anagram
The site dictionary holds 239,364 common English words. 42,467 of them, or 17.7 %, have at least one anagram among the other common words.
Those words form 18,042 families, groups spelled with exactly the same letters. A family holds 2.35 words on average.
- Common words
- 239,364
- Have an anagram
- 42,467 (17.7 %)
- Families
- 18,042
- Words per family
- 2.35
Where Anagrams Hide
The share of words with an anagram peaks at 4 letters, at 59.5 %. Short words are packed tightly, so they collide often, and every extra letter makes a match less likely.
At ten letters the share falls to 7.8 %, one of the steepest drops among the five languages. English has few inflected forms to fill long families.
| Letters | Words | With an anagram |
|---|---|---|
| 3 | 1,255 | 57.7 % |
| 4 | 5,080 | 59.5 % |
| 5 | 11,075 | 49.0 % |
| 6 | 19,190 | 39.1 % |
| 7 | 28,729 | 30.6 % |
| 8 | 35,804 | 21.4 % |
| 9 | 35,486 | 13.6 % |
| 10 | 31,329 | 7.8 % |
The Largest Families
Short words with common letters make the biggest families in English. The largest one has 13 words, all spelled with the same letters.
13 words
12 words
12 words
Pairs That Tell a Story
Among the words everyone uses, a few pairs look as if they were made on purpose.
The Letters That Help
Words with an anagram lean harder on the most common letters. E and S gain the most ground from one column to the other, while words without an anagram keep more of the rarer ones.
| # | Words with an anagram | Words without one |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | E 13.4 % | E 10.7 % |
| 2 | S 11.1 % | I 9.3 % |
| 3 | R 8.8 % | S 8.8 % |
| 4 | A 8.4 % | A 7.7 % |
| 5 | I 8.0 % | O 6.9 % |
And in the Other Languages
The same counts for the four other languages on the site. Each language has its own page of figures.
| Language | Words | With an anagram | Peak |
|---|---|---|---|
| Spanish | 183,133 | 28.2 % | 4 letters, 62.8 % |
| French | 352,880 | 25.5 % | 5 letters, 51.2 % |
| Italian | 145,081 | 21.7 % | 4 letters, 58.4 % |
| English | 239,364 | 17.7 % | 4 letters, 59.5 % |
| German | 182,626 | 10.3 % | 5 letters, 39.7 % |
Method and Limits
Only common words count, the same list as the word pages on the site. Two words are anagrams when they use the same letters, accents ignored. First names are left out.
Comparing languages calls for care. The dictionaries differ in size, and the more words a language has, the more likely two of them share their letters. Common vocabulary is not drawn from the same kind of source in every language either.
Inflected forms count everywhere but weigh very differently. French and Spanish have many verb forms, hence their large verb families. German keeps Ä, Ö and Ü as separate letters and Spanish does the same with Ñ, which lowers their odds of an anagram.