Lugg is the handle I have used online for years. I am not a lexicographer and I do not have a competitive ranking to point at — I am someone who plays a lot of word games, got interested in the mechanics behind them, and ended up building a tool and writing about what I learned. This page exists so you can judge for yourself whether the guides on this site are worth your time.
How I got into word games
I started playing Scrabble properly in my late teens, against family members who beat me consistently for about two years. What eventually changed my results was not getting smarter — it was learning the two-letter word list. All 107 of them. Suddenly I could always find a play, always fit something into a tight board, and always dump an awkward tile somewhere useful.
That was the moment word games stopped feeling like a vocabulary test and started feeling like a system with learnable rules. Most of the gap between a casual player and a decent one is not intelligence or reading history. It is a handful of specific, memorisable things: the short word lists, the tile distribution, which letters combine, when to hold a tile versus dump it. That insight is the reason this site exists, and it shapes everything I write here.
These days I play a mix of physical Scrabble and Words With Friends, mostly casually. I am still regularly beaten by people who know more obscure words than I do.
Why I built Scramblfix
I had three specific complaints about the word unscramblers I was using:
- They were slow. Most sent your letters to a server, ran the search there, and returned a rendered page. That is a round trip of several hundred milliseconds for a computation that takes a few milliseconds.
- They were hostile. Interstitials, newsletter walls, ad units stacked above the actual results, and in a few cases an email gate before you could see anything.
- They sent my rack to a server. Nothing sinister is necessarily happening with that data, but there is no reason a word search needs to leave my machine at all.
So I built the version I wanted. The whole point was that it should be fast, free, and should not transmit what you type.
How the search engine actually works
This is the part I would want to know if I were evaluating a tool like this, so here is the detail.
The entire word search runs client-side in a Web Worker. When the page loads, it fetches a plain-text dictionary file once and builds an in-memory index in your browser. Every subsequent search — unscramble, Wordle pattern, crossword pattern — runs against that local index inside the worker thread. The letters you type never leave your device, because there is no server-side search endpoint to send them to.
Putting the search in a Worker rather than on the main thread matters for a practical reason: scanning a 170,000-word list and scoring the matches would otherwise block rendering and make typing feel laggy. Offloading it to a worker keeps the input responsive while results stream back as you type.
The one thing that does leave your browser during normal use is a word definition lookup. When you tap a result to see what it means, that word — and only that word — is sent to the Free Dictionary API. If you never tap a result, nothing is ever requested. This is documented in the privacy policy alongside everything else the site stores locally.
Which dictionary I use, and why it matters
Scramblfix uses the ENABLE word list (Enhanced North American Benchmark Lexicon). I chose it because it is openly available, widely used, and closely related to the lexicon behind the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary and the North American Tournament Word List.
I want to be straightforward about the limitation this creates. ENABLE is not identical to any official tournament list, and it is not the Words With Friends dictionary. Words With Friends uses its own lexicon that includes entries TWL does not, and excludes some that TWL has. Collins Scrabble Words, used in international play, is broader still.
What that means for you: a word appearing in Scramblfix is strong evidence it is playable, but it is not a ruling. If you are in a tournament or a game with money on it, check the word list your game actually uses. I say this in the guides too, every time a word list is involved, because a tool that pretends to be more authoritative than it is does you no favours.
My editorial rules for the guides
There are guides on this site about Scrabble strategy, Wordle technique, Words With Friends, crosswords, and the history of the games. I write all of them. The rules I hold myself to:
- Word lists get verified before publishing. Every word I claim is valid gets checked against the dictionary rather than recalled from memory. If a word is valid in Collins but not TWL, I label it.
- I flag dictionary differences instead of glossing over them. "Valid in Scrabble" and "valid in Words With Friends" are different claims and I try never to blur them.
- No padding. If a topic is genuinely a 600-word answer, I would rather publish 600 words than inflate it to hit a length target.
- I do not claim expertise I lack. I am not going to write a piece on competitive tournament preparation, because I have not done it. I write about what I have actually learned by playing and by building this tool.
- Corrections get made. If I have a word or a rule wrong, tell me and I will fix the page.
What I am still working on
The tool is not finished. Things I want to add: a proper board-aware scoring mode that accounts for premium squares rather than just raw tile values, complete reference lists for the short-word sets, and better Wordle filtering for constraints like "contains E but not in position two."
Two reference pages exist so far — tile values and distribution and Q-without-U words — and I am adding more as I go.
Corrections and contact
If I have something wrong, or a word is misclassified, or you want to argue about whether using an unscrambler counts as cheating, I read every message that comes through the contact form. Corrections are the messages I most want to receive — a reference page with an error in it is worse than no reference page.