Word Rush

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Scrambled letters and four candidate words. Pick the real one in forty-five seconds while the words grow from five letters to seven. A wrong answer costs two seconds.

1–10 players1–4 minWordsFocus

Solo run

Forty-five seconds of scrambled words.

Letters arrive out of order and four words line up beneath them. Tap the real one. Words get longer as you go, and a wrong answer costs two seconds.

No personal best saved yet — this run can set one.

How to play

1
Letters out of order
A word arrives with its letters scrambled. Five letters at first, then six, then seven as you warm up.
2
Four words, one answer
Beneath the scramble sit four real words of the same length. Exactly one of them uses those letters.
3
Wrong answers cost time
A correct word scores one point. A wrong one scores nothing and takes two seconds off the clock.
4
Forty-five seconds
When time runs out your score is the number of words solved. Your best stays in this browser.

Tap or click an answer, or press 1 to 4 on a keyboard. Options are laid out in the same place every time.

How to unscramble faster

Do not try to rearrange the letters in your head. Read the four options instead and test each one against the scramble — checking is far quicker than solving, because the wrong words are always the same length and most of them fail on the first two letters.

The other habit worth building: hunt for common endings. Letters that make -ING, -ED, -LY or a double letter very often sit at the end of the word, and finding one collapses the search space instantly.

What counts as a good score?

Ten to fourteen words in forty-five seconds is a normal, comfortable run — around one word every three seconds. Above twenty means you have stopped solving and started checking, which is exactly the trick.

21+ wordsFluent

Better than two a second late on. Word-game brain.

15–20Sharp

Fast and clean, with room to spare.

10–14Solid

A steady run — the usual good score.

6–9Getting there

The seven-letter words are doing the damage.

Under 6Warming up

Cold starts are brutal here. Go again.

Why the words get longer

A five-letter scramble can often be solved by luck; a seven-letter one almost never can. Growing the words as the run goes on means the early points come quickly and the later ones have to be earned — so two players on the same score have usually done quite different amounts of work.

Play it with a group

In Tournament mode each player takes one forty-five-second run on the same device, with a handover screen in between. Standings rank words solved, and a tie goes to whoever made fewer wrong taps. Good on a long train journey with people who like an argument.

English is not everyone's first language, and a word game will always favour native speakers. The scramble is the same challenge either way — take it as a bit of fun.

Played on a keyboard? Press 1 to 4 to answer without moving the mouse — it is noticeably quicker once you are used to the layout.