The Anagram Engine

 

Introduction - The Anagram Engine explained

Most anagram programs try to "guess" the anagrams you'll like. Some of them even do a good job, picking out rude or funny words. But the speciality of the Anagram Engine is it puts you in control. It is able to solve and create anagrams in a way that automatic systems simply can't. It's like the forensic expert of anagrams!

Its incredible number-crunching power is able to calculate all the permuations of words in your phrase, not just a small selection. But it can return a lot of anagrams. If your name is 30 letters long, it could easily generate over a million anagrams! This is just too many to manage, so there are some option settings to provide you with a way to filter your results and control the engine. This way you can zoom-in on the best anagrams, and this page describes how to do it.

 

What is an anagram?

To understand how the anagram engine works, you need to know what an anagram is! Here's a little refresher in case you're rusty. To make an anagram, you take all the letters in a word or sentence and re-arrange them to make a new word or sentence. It's that simple! Your starting word/sentence will have all the same letters as your anagram, so it will be just the same length and contain just as many of each letter as you started with. You won't have any spare letters left over. You can imagine you are using scrabble tiles, and moving them around the desk to make a new word/sentence.

So, as an example, here's one using my name, "Nik Sargent". I can re-arrange all those letters into "Strange Ink". All the letters in my starting words got used up once, and only once.

Of course there are anagrams, and there are anargams! Really good anagrams somehow relate to what you started with, perhaps in some funny or descriptive way. Here's a really good one that shows what I mean: "two plus eleven" can be made into an anagram of "one plus twelve" - and of course if you do the sums you get 13 each time. Now THAT is a clever anagram!

Hints and Tips

All these options and numbers look a bit complicated?

The options/numbers on the input screen allow you to control the way the anagram engine produces results. If you are not getting enough results then you'll need to change these options.

The settings look complicated, but they aren't; though the best settings depend on how long and varied your input phrase is. Once you understand how the anagram engine works, it's easypeasy to get some good results!

If you don't want to read this page to understand how they work and just want to see how you get on, then just click search and don't bother changing any of the settings. If your results aren't very good, then right at the end of the results page the Anagram Engine will tell you what needs to be done to the settings! Better still, it will go right ahead and make those changes for you, all you need to click is "Do it for me"!

So, how does it work?

The anagram engine does exactly what you would do on a piece of paper if you were trying to make anagrams. It does it in two steps:
First, it creates a list of words that can be found from the letters of your phrase. This is called the "master list". (hint: this is just what you do when you play scrabble - figure out all the words you can get from your letters.)

 

When you generate an anagram, first of all a master list of all the words that are part of your bigger word is created - it could be several hundred, even thousands. Second, the anagram engine then does the hard work of trying to fit all these possible words together using exactly all the letters in the phrase you typed.

The more words in the master list, the more anagrams you will get. The setting "shortest word size" controls what words go into this list. If this is set to 1, then all words of length 1 or more (i.e. all words) that fit your phrase will go into the master list. However, if you set this high, e.g. 10, then only words of size 10 or bigger will go in the master list. This won't be many words, and so it is quite likely you won't get any anagrams made at all!
Therefore, lower values for this setting are better. If you aren't getting any anagrams, try setting this to 1.

Once you have a master list, the anagram engine will try and join them together to make your anagrams. The diagram shows an example of how it does this. The longest word in the anagram is always first, and the shortest last.

If you want to have a word of a certain length, you can use the setting "Must Contain Size", to make sure all anagrams have at least a word of that size. Remember though, if you set the number too high you may not get any results. For example, you may ask to have a word of at least size 10, but there may be no words that long in your master list - in which case you'll get no results.
Therefore, lower values for this setting are also better for getting more anagrams. If you aren't getting any anagrams, try setting this to 1.

Finally, you can also control the number of words overall in each result. You may prefer a long sentence of short words, or a short sentence of long words (which is a better quality anagram). Use the "Max Words" setting to control this. If this is set too low, though, it may not be possible to get any results. For example, if you set "Max Words" for only 1 word, there may be no words big enough in the master list to create a valid anagram.

Therefore, higher values for this setting are better.

What if there's a word I always want included/excluded?

If you spot a word in your phrase that you would like to have in all your results, then just add it to the mandatory word box. Or if you like, you can exclude this word from your results if it is appearing too often by ticking the "exclude" box. (The Anagram Engine will then remove it from the search and add/remove it to all outputs. Doing this will greatly improve the search speed, since your input phrase will be shorter.)

About the dictionary

The dictionary contains around 30000 words. It includes a number of proper nouns, which generally account for any words that seem mispelt or non-existent! However, if you choose "scrabble" mode to generate just a master list, the anagram engine automatically selects the 100,000 word monster dictionary!

The dictionaries a number of unedited slang, expletive and colloquial expressions, as you would find in any ordinary dictionary. If you think these may offend, please don't use the anagram engine.

I'm constantly refining the dictionary based on user feedback and performance data, so please feel free to make suggestions.

Future work will possibly look at classifying word types. This should allow for easier selection of 'good' anagrams.