Free Word Scramble and Unscrambler

How to play

1. Press Play. Winifred puts the first word on the desk: five oak tiles on the rack, with its category on the clue card above.
2. Tap the tiles in order to spell the word. Each tile you tap goes to the first empty well on the leather blotter. Tap a placed tile to send it back to the rack.
3. When every well is full the word is checked. If it is the word, the tiles glow and a gold flourish is drawn under it. If not, the row stays put so you can fix it: send a tile or two back and try again.
4. Stuck? Shuffle the rack for a fresh look, or press Hint to have the next letter set in place. Skip, pressed twice, shows the word and counts it as skipped.
5. Next word takes you on through the pack. Menu opens the packs at each level, today’s ten, the unscrambler, Settings, your statistics and the rules.

Controls

• Touch or mouse: tap a tile on the rack to place it, and tap a placed tile to send it back. Shuffle, Clear, Hint, Skip and Menu sit at the bottom of the desk, under your thumb. When a word is done, a ribbon over the rack shows how it went, with a Next word button.
• Keyboard: type a letter to place a tile with that letter. Backspace sends the last tile back, Escape clears the wells, Space shuffles, ? gives a hint, Enter goes on to the next word, and Tab moves between the buttons.
• The unscrambler opens from the title or the Menu. Type your letters, with ? for a blank; the list updates as you type. Restart in the toolbar sends your placed tiles back to the rack. The toolbar also has pause, help, optional sound and fullscreen.

What you do

Teasel Lane Word Scramble is the classic word scramble, a kind of anagram game: a word is shown with its letters shuffled, and you put them back in order. It is played at an oak desk in a study at dusk. The plaster is a muted sage, a window looks out on the roofs of the lane under a thin moon, a stoneware jar of dried teasels stands on the sill, and a brass banker’s lamp with a green glass shade lights the desk. The letters are oak tiles on a walnut rack, and the word goes into wells pressed into an ink-blue leather blotter with brass corners, beside a cup of tea, a pair of reading glasses and a folded newspaper with its crossword half done. Winifred, a goldfinch in a sage cardigan and half-moon spectacles, keeps you company from a stack of old books at the far side of the desk. She breathes, blinks and watches the tiles, nods when you have it, and raises a brow at a row that is not a word. Every puzzle word was chosen so that no other word in the list uses the same letters, so each one has a single answer, and each comes with a category on its clue card, such as In the kitchen, Birds or Books and writing. The unscrambler on the same page is a word unscrambler and anagram solver: type up to 15 letters, with up to three blanks, and it lists every word they make from the ENABLE word list, longest first, right on your device.

• 1,020 puzzles with one answer each, in 102 packs of ten: 250 Easy words of five letters, 410 Medium words of six or seven and 360 Hard words of eight to eleven. Every pack is open from the start.
• A category clue for every word, from 19 categories such as In the kitchen, Birds, Trees and woodland, Music, Travel and Books and writing. Turn clues face down in Settings if you would rather lift the card yourself.
• Shuffle, Clear, Hint and Skip. A hint sets the next letter of the word in place, from the left, up to every letter but the last. Skip asks once before it shows the word.
• Today’s ten: three Easy, four Medium and three Hard words a day, the same for everyone on the same date, each played once, with a streak for days with all ten solved and a result line you can copy that names no words.
• The unscrambler: type up to 15 letters, with ? for up to three blanks, and see every word they make in the ENABLE word list (172,336 words, offensive words left out), grouped by length, longest first. It runs on your device and needs no account.
• Tap, click or type. No clock in any mode, statistics by level, reduced motion support and a saved game in this browser.

Tips worth knowing

• Build the end of the word first. Of the 1,020 puzzle words, 157 end in E, 105 in Y and 99 in ER, and 30 end in ING, so when the rack holds an I, an N and a G, set them at the end and work on what is left.
• Put letters that like each other together. ER turns up in 166 of the 1,020 puzzle words, IN in 116 and AR in 107. Of the consonant pairs, CH, ST, NG, CK, SH, ND and TH are the ones to try, and a third of the words hold at least one.
• Spread the vowels out. About 36 letters in every 100 in the puzzle words are A, E, I, O or U, and 759 of the 1,020 words never set more than two consonants side by side. If your try has three in a row, it can still be right (STR, NCH, GHT), but look at it again.
• Read the clue card. Knowing the word is in Birds or In the kitchen rules out far more than any letter does, which is why Settings lets you turn the clues face down when you want the harder game.
• Shuffle when the rack has gone stale. The scramble you are dealt never starts with the word’s first letter, and in 1,015 of the 1,020 puzzles no letter sits in its own place, so the first order is no help at all. A new order often is.
• A Q nearly always wants a U. In the word list, 2,492 of the 2,521 words with a Q have a U straight after every Q, so put them together and move on to the rest.
• Spend a hint early on a long word. Hints set letters from the left, so one or two on a Hard word give you its beginning, and the ending tips above usually find the rest.

Accessibility

• Everything can be played with a keyboard: type a letter to place it, Backspace and Escape send tiles back, Space shuffles, ? gives a hint and Enter goes on to the next word.
• Every tile is a button labeled with its letter and where it is, and each placed or returned tile is announced with the letters so far, a blank for each empty well.
• Color is never the only clue: a hinted tile has a brass inlay and is announced as set by a hint, and in the unscrambler a letter a blank stands for is shown in italics and underlined.
• Nothing is timed in any mode, a row that is not the word only brings a gentle remark, and Skip asks before it shows the word.
• Reduced motion places tiles at once without sliding or shaking and draws the flourish whole. Sound is optional and never needed to play.

Questions

Guides and roundups

• How to Unscramble Words: Patterns and Tips
• Games Like Wordle: 15 Wordle Alternatives to Try
• Quick Free Games to Play When Bored at Work
• Best Cozy Puzzle Games to Play in 2026

Game details

Lovely on tablets

Genre

Cozy Classic

Difficulty

Medium

Session

A minute or so a word, saved as you go

Inputs

Keyboard, Mouse, Touch

Devices

Desktop, Tablet, Mobile

Made by

CozyWorld

Updated

2026-10-31

A quiet word puzzle with no purchases, accounts or timers; offensive words are left out of the puzzles and the unscrambler.