Checking Whether Two Words Are Anagrams

This lesson covers checking whether two words are anagrams in Java, so you understand a technique for comparing strings by rearranging them. It's for anyone searching "Java anagram check implementation."

An anagram is a different word formed by rearranging the same letters (like "listen" and "silent"). You can check for one by rearranging both strings' characters and comparing whether they match.

The example converts a string to lowercase and then to a character array with a.toLowerCase().toCharArray(), sorts it with Arrays.sort(), then compares with Arrays.equals(). "listen" and "silent" share the same letters, so once sorted, they match.

A common early mistake is not accounting for uppercase/lowercase differences. The example unifies to lowercase with toLowerCase() before comparing — skip this, and the same word gets judged as different just because of case.

This is a basic technique for comparing strings while ignoring their character order — for longer strings, counting how many times each character appears is a faster way to check.

📖 Reference code

import java.util.Arrays;

public class Main {
    static boolean isAnagram(String a, String b) {
        char[] ca = a.toLowerCase().toCharArray();
        char[] cb = b.toLowerCase().toCharArray();
        Arrays.sort(ca);
        Arrays.sort(cb);
        return Arrays.equals(ca, cb);
    }

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        System.out.println(isAnagram("listen", "silent"));
        System.out.println(isAnagram("hello", "world"));
    }
}

✍️ Your code

Type your code, then press "Run"

🧪 This site can't compile or run Java directly, so it checks on the spot whether what you typed matches the reference code (scoring happens entirely in your browser — nothing is sent anywhere).