anagram

by Cliff Miller

version 0.8.1, released 7/12/03

Features

• Generates words, phrases, or people's names (using special dictionaries of first and last names from the U.S. Census).
• Name anagrams can be 2-name or 3-name (first-first-last or first-last-last) and may optionally be limited to male or female first names only.
• Word or phrase anagrams can be of an arbitrary number of words, or be limited only to n-word anagrams, where n is a specific number or range -- e.g., only 2-word anagrams, or anagrams of 3 to 5 words.
• Search can be limited only to anagrams containing a specific word.
• Other dictionaries/word-lists can be specified -- thus, anagrams in other languages can be generated if you have a foreign word-list.
• Word-permutations of the same anagram are not listed (i.e. if "cat dog elf" is an anagram, then "dog elf cat" or "elf cat dog" are suppressed).
• Sub-anagrams are listed as slash-separated lists, which reduces clutter. For example "star artist" contains (among others) 12 anagrams made from the four anagrams of "star" and the three anagrams of "artist" -- neatly summarized in the listing as:
  arts/rats/star/tsar artist/strait/traits

Example anagrams

Requirements

• Any modern C compiler (e.g. gcc).
• If you're installing anagram for the first time, you'll need both source code and dictionary data files, provided as two separate tar.gz files below. If upgrading, you only need the source code (just copy or symlink the data files into the appropriate new location).
• You can also use/install your own dictionary files. Just invoke anagram with the -d option pointing at the dictionary file you want, and/or install it into $prefix/etc to make it permanently available.

Download

• source code: anagram-0.8.1.tar.gz
• dictionary data: anagram-data.tar.gz

The dictionary data archive provides two regular English word lists, plus first- and last-name lists derived from U.S. Census data.

Historical Note