Our Anagram Solver is great, if we say so ourselves, but it does have limitations. In particular, it can’t work out solutions that involve very short words such as ‘A’ or ‘of’. So, if you were looking for the solution to the following clue:
He’s hard to find and makes a dog moan
… it’d struggle because the solution is ‘a good man’. However, you should normally know what the word split will be for a solution (in this case it’d be (1,4,3) so, given that the first letter is almost certainly ‘a’ or ‘i’ you can still use the Anagram Solver.
For ‘a dog moan’, you’re in luck because there is no ‘i’ so you can reasonably guess that the first single letter is ‘a’. In the Anagram Solver, set the letters to solve as just ‘dogmoan’ and indicate a split of 4,3. With luck and a following wind you should find that ‘dog moan’ is in the solution list. Of course, if you have any of the letters for the solution the task becomes even easier.
They won’t always be as easy as this but we’ve found that when the solution is multiple words – particularly involving 2s and 3s as lengths then you can usually take an educated guess at ‘the’ or ‘and’ being the 3 letter solution and ‘of’ or ‘in’ or ‘at’ being amongst the 2s. In the Telegraph at least, ‘phrase’ solutions like this (four or more words) are almost always commonly known phrases and often include ‘of the’, in the’ and so on. So you can use the same technique if you think you’ve spotted an anagram with an ‘f’ in it, two es, a t and an h. Just remove these letters from the clue letters and enter a split matching the words that are left.
Don’t forget you can also use the Anagram Solver to create anagrams. If you enter a single word and the split you want, the system will provide you with words matching that split and provided letters. Handy for making your own crosswords!
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