VB.NET, C#, JavaScript, VBScript, Java

All of those are capable of running stand-alone applications or of creating HTML output for browsers.

VB.NET, C#, and Java can even do so in GUI environments. Though then the code you write for support of the GUI will be *completely* different from what you write when you incorporate the language into web pages.

JavaScript and VBScript can be used as command-line languages *OR* as part of ASP to produce HTML output *OR* can work completely client-side, in the browser, with no server-side coding needed. [VBScript, of course, only works in MSIE like this. JavaScript works in virtually all browsers.]

So...

For your simple little experiment, I'd probably just stick with JavaScript in a browser. Pretty trivial, really. You would need to first learn enough HTML to be dangerous, but then integrating that with JS code in the browser is a relatively small step.

But any of the above will work. And of course you can use PHP and CF and other web-only languages. But you indicated you wanted an either/or language.

Finally... I sure don't see why you couldn't do this in Access. Though I certainly couldn't recommend that approach. The code would *ONLY* run, then, when you loaded up and ran Access-the-program. (You couldn't integrate it easily with a web solution, for example.)

Want a sample HTML page with JavaScript that demonstrates the word scrambling?? I think I could toss it off in 15 minutes or so. Or do you really want the "joy" of doing it yourself?