Anagram Checker
Type two words or phrases — the verdict updates instantly, entirely in your browser.
Phrase A
Normalized & sorted
— Letter counts
Phrase B
Normalized & sorted
— Letter counts
How the comparison actually works
Two phrases are anagrams if you can rearrange the letters of one to form the other exactly. This checker normalizes each phrase first: lowercase it, then strip everything that isn't a letter or number (Unicode-aware, so accented words are handled correctly) using a code-point-safe method so multi-byte characters aren't mangled. What's left is sorted alphabetically character by character. If the two sorted strings are identical, the phrases are anagrams — the sorted form makes any rearrangement of the same letters collapse to the same string, and comparing letter counts (not just which letters appear) is what correctly rejects look-alikes like "aab" vs "abb".
Worked example
Type listen and silent. Both normalize and sort
to eilnst — six letters, identical order once sorted
— so the verdict reads "Yes — these are anagrams." Try
the eyes and they see: both strip down to seven
letters each and sort to eeehsty, another match, even
though the words split completely differently.
Frequently asked questions
Do spaces and punctuation count?
No — the standard rule for anagrams ignores them. Before comparing, the checker strips everything except letters and numbers from both phrases, so 'the eyes' and 'they see' are judged purely on their six letters each, not on where the word breaks fall. A strict character-for-character comparison including spaces would fail almost every classic phrase anagram.
Does case matter?
No. Both phrases are lowercased before comparing, so 'Listen' and 'Silent' match exactly the way 'listen' and 'silent' do — capitalization carries no meaning for this check.
What about repeated letters — does the count matter?
Yes, exactly. Two phrases are anagrams only if they contain the same letters the same number of times each, not just the same set of distinct letters. 'aab' and 'abb' both use only the letters a and b, but 'aab' has two a's and one b while 'abb' has one a and two b's — different counts, so this checker correctly marks them as NOT anagrams, even though a careless 'do they share the same letters' check might wrongly pass them.
What's a good example of a longer anagram?
'astronomer' and 'moon starer' is a fun one — ten letters each, once the space is stripped, rearranged into a phrase that's thematically related to the original word. It's a nice demonstration that anagram-matching scales past single words into full phrases; try it with the example button below.