About this tool
The Word Scrambler rearranges the letters inside each word of your text and leaves everything else where it was. Word order, spaces, line breaks, punctuation and numbers are untouched, so a sentence keeps its shape — only the spelling of each word gets jumbled. It does not shuffle the order of words; if that is what you need, see the note at the end of this page. Everything runs in your browser and nothing is sent to a server.
How to use the Word Scrambler
- Type or paste your text — a single word, a list, or a full sentence. The result updates as you type.
- Optionally lock the first and last letter of longer words for an easier puzzle.
- Copy the result, or click "Re-scramble" for a new random arrangement.
How the scrambling works
The tool looks for unbroken runs of the letters A–Z and a–z and treats each run as one word. Each word is shuffled with the Fisher–Yates algorithm, which walks backwards through the letters and swaps each one with a randomly chosen position at or before it. Done this way, every possible arrangement of the letters is equally likely, avoiding the bias of simpler tricks such as sorting by a random number. Anything that isn't a plain ASCII letter acts as a boundary and stays exactly in place, which has some visible consequences:
- Contractions and hyphenated words split.
don'tis handled asdon, the apostrophe, thent;well-knownis two separate words. - Accented letters are boundaries. In
caféonlycafis shuffled and theéstays at the end. Text in non-Latin scripts passes through unchanged. - Digits split words.
9amcan become9ma, with the 9 staying first. - Capitals travel with their letter.
Doncan come out asoDn; the tool doesn't re-capitalise the first position.
The "keep first & last letter" option
With the option off, every letter can move, so the result gives no reliable clue about how a word starts or ends — a genuinely hard puzzle. With it on, words of four or more letters keep their first and last letters and only the interior is shuffled. That is the style behind the popular observation that text stays surprisingly readable when only the middle letters are mixed up, and it makes puzzles much easier. Words of two or three letters are an exception: the tool shuffles them completely even with the option on, so are can come out as rea. If short words need to stay fixed, check them in the output.
Worked example
Input: Scrambled words are surprisingly readable.
One run with the option off produced lbcmeaSdr wdros rae isurplgnsyir elaedrba. Every letter, including the capital S, has moved, while the full stop stayed at the end.
One run with the option on produced Sracemlbd wdors rea sliunpsrrigy rebaalde. Each long word still starts and ends with its original letters, which makes the sentence far easier to decode, while are was fully shuffled because it has only three letters. Your own results will differ, since every run is random.
Why a word sometimes comes back unchanged
A word with n different letters has n! possible orders (n × (n−1) × … × 1), and the original spelling is one of them. So a two-letter word comes back unchanged half the time, and a three-letter word such as cat one time in six. Repeated letters make it more likely still: puzzle has 360 distinct arrangements, but with its first and last letters locked only 12 remain, so roughly one run in twelve leaves it looking untouched. With the option on, book can never change at all, because its only movable letters are the two identical o's. The tool doesn't reject a result that matches the original, so when you're making a puzzle, read through the output and re-scramble if a word slipped through.
Common use cases
- Word-jumble and unscramble puzzles for worksheets, quizzes and party games
- Spelling practice, where learners rebuild each word from its letters
- Vocabulary warm-ups: scramble this week's word list, one word per line
- Showing how much readers rely on the first and last letters of words
When to use another tool
To shuffle the order of words or lines rather than the letters inside them, put one item per line and use the shuffle option in the Text Sorter. And because capital letters can give away where a word starts, it helps to convert a puzzle list to all lowercase with the Case Converter before scrambling it.
Frequently asked questions
For short words, yes — a random shuffle can occasionally land back on the original letter order, especially for 2-3 letter words. Re-scrambling (typing a space and deleting it, or clicking again) will usually produce a different result.
No — by default this scrambles every letter in the word, including the first and last. Turn on the "Keep first & last letter in place" option for the easier, classic word-jumble style. That option applies to words of four or more letters; two- and three-letter words are still fully shuffled.
Yes — paste multiple words or a full sentence, and each word is scrambled independently while word order and spacing stay the same.
No — word order, spacing and punctuation always stay the same, and only the letters inside each word move. To shuffle whole words or lines, put one item per line and use the shuffle option in the Text Sorter.