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Phrase · Lost order

I have all 24 words but not the order: what can be done

Intuition says that if you have all the words the work is almost nothing: just put them in order. The reality is the opposite. Ordering twenty-four words gives a number of combinations that fits in no head and no computer. And yet most of these cases do get solved, for a reason almost nobody explains.

September 23, 2026 · 5-minute read

Why «I don’t know the order» can’t be brute-forced

The number of ways to order twenty-four words has twenty-four digits. That is not «a lot»: it is more than the number of seconds the universe has existed, multiplied by millions. No computer, nor all of them together, traverses that. With twelve words the figure is smaller but just as impossible.

The phrase’s internal check helps, but it doesn’t save you: it throws out fifteen of every sixteen attempts, which is irrelevant against a twenty-four-digit number.

The version that does work: a bounded jumble

When someone tells me «I don’t know the order», it almost always turns out they know quite a lot. These are the real cases, and all of them are workable:

  • I’m unsure whether two specific words are swapped: two possibilities, tested in a second.
  • I wrote the phrase in two columns and don’t know if it reads down or across: that’s two readings, not millions.
  • I have the words in alphabetical order because I «tidied them up»: here there is a real problem, but with the wallet app and an address there are sometimes angles.
  • The paper got wet and I don’t know if these three lines go in this order: six combinations. Trivial.
That is why the question I will ask is not «do you know the order?» but «what exactly are you unsure about?». The answer to that second question usually turns a case that looked impossible into a five-minute one.

If they really are completely loose

Then the honest answer is no. It is not that it is expensive or slow: there is simply no way. And if someone tells you they can order twenty-four loose words with no further information, they are lying to you, because the number allows no argument.

The only exception is new information turning up: an old photo of the paper, a partial copy, remembering that the first three were these. It is worth looking for that before looking for someone to solve it. See the information you should gather before asking for help.

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