NAME¶
wordplay - anagram finder
SYNOPSIS¶
wordplay string [-slxavnmd] [-w word] [-f wordfile]
DESCRIPTION¶
wordplay is an anagram finder. What is an anagram? Well, let's turn to
Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, Tenth Edition:
- anagram:
- a word or phrase made by transposing the letters of another word or
phrase.
Each letter in the anagram must appear with the same frequency as in the
original string.
For example, the letters in the word "stop" can be rearranged to spell
"tops" or "pots" or "sotp". "sotp" is
not a word and is not of interest when generating anagrams. "stop"
has four letters, so there are 24 ways to rearrange its letters. However, very
few of the rearrangements actually spell words.
Wordplay, by using a list of words, takes a specified string of letters and uses
the list of words to find anagrams of the string.
By the way, "Wordplay" anagrams to "Rowdy Pal", and the
program really can live up to that particular anagram. I have been able to
come up with anagrams of most of my coworkers' names that are humorous,
descriptive, satirical, or, occasionally, quite vulgar.
OPTIONS¶
- string
- String to be anagrammed. This should be seen to the program as a
single argument. If you feel you must put spaces in the string,
under UNIX, you will have to put backslashes in front of the spaces or
just put the entire string in double quotes. Just leave the spaces out
because the program throws them out anyway.
- -s
- Silent operation. If this option is used, the header and line numbers are
not printed. This is useful if you want the output to contain only the
anagrams. Use this option with the l (and x) option to generate a wordlist
which can be piped or redirected. This option does not suppress error
messages that are printed to stderr. Finding zero anagrams is not an
error.
- -l
- Print list of candidate words before anagramming. This is the list of
words that can be spelled with the letters from the specified string, with
no letters being used more often that they appear in the input
string.
- -x
- Do not perform anagramming. Use with l if you just want the candidate word
list without anagrams.
- -a
- Allow anagrams containing two or more occurrences of a word.
- -v
- Consider strings with no vowels as candidate words and do not give up when
there are no vowels remaining after extractions.
- -m
- Limit candidate word length to a maximum number of letters. Follow by an
integer. m12 means limit words to 12 letters. m5 means limit them to 5
letters.
- -n
- Limit candidate word length to a minimum number of letters. Follow by an
integer. n2 means limit words to 2 letters. n11 means limit them to 11
letters.
- -d
- Limit number of words in anagrams to a maximum number. Follow by an
integer. d3 means no anagrams should contain more than 3 words. d12 means
limit anagrams to 12 words. This is currently the option that I recommend
to limit output, since an optimization has been added to speed execution
in some cases when this option is used.
- -w
- Specify a word which should appear in all anagrams. This is useful if you
already have a word in mind that you want in the anagrams. This option
should be specified at the end of the command, followed by a space and the
word to use.
- -f
- Specify which word list to use. See example! This option should be
specified at the end of the command, followed by a space and the alternate
wordfile name. This is useful if you have other word lists to try or if
you are interested in making your own customized word list. New feature:
Use a hyphen as the filename if the wordlist should be read from
stdin.
EXAMPLES¶
- wordplay persiangulf
- Anagram the string "persiangulf" .
- wordplay anagramming -lx
- Print the list of words from the wordlist that can be spelled by using the
letters from the word "anagramming". A letter may not be used
more often than the number of times it occurs in the word
"anagramming". No anagrams are generated.
- wordplay tomservocrow -n3m8
- Anagram the string "tomservocrow" . Do not use words shorter
than 3 letters or longer than 8 letters.
- wordplay persiangulf -ld3m10 -f /usr/share/dict/words
- Print the candidate words for the string "persiangulf". Print
anagrams containing up to 3 words, without considering any words longer
than 10 characters. Use the file "/usr/share/dict/words" rather
than "words721.txt".
- wordplay soylentgreen -n3w stolen -f w2
- Print anagrams of "soylentgreen" containing the word
"stolen" and use the file "w2" as the wordlist file.
Discard candidate words shorter than 3 characters.
- wordplay university -slx
- Print the candidate word list for the string "university". The
output will consist of just the words. This output is more useful for
redirecting to a file or for piping to another program.
- wordplay trymeout -s
- Anagram the string "trymeout" and print the anagrams with no
line numbers. The header will not be printed. This is useful for piping
the output to another process (or saving it to a file to be used by
another program) without having to parse the output to remove the numbers
and header.
- wordplay trymeout -v
- Anagram "trymeout" as usual, but in case vowel-free strings are
in the wordlist, consider them as possible candidate words.
- cat wordlist1 wordlist2 wordlist3 | sort -u | wordplay trymeout -f -
- Anagram "trymeout" and read the wordlist from stdin, so that, in
this case, the three wordlists "wordlist1",
"wordlist2", and "wordlist3" will be concatenated and
piped into wordplay as the wordlist. The "sort -u" is
there to remove duplicate words from the combined wordlist.
NOTES¶
If the option specifiers are combined, as in "an7m7d5f" or
"d3n5f", the f should come last, followed by a space and the word
list file.
The "w" option is used in the same manner.
Limit the number of words to consider, if desired, using the n and m options, or
better yet, use the d option to limit depth, when anagramming certain
time-consuming strings. The program is currently optimized to speed execution
in some cases when the d option is used.
It is highly recommended that the "words721.txt" file distributed with
the program be used, since many nonsense two and three-letter combinations
that are not words have been eliminated. This makes the quality of the output
slightly better and speeds execution of the program a slight bit. Any word
list may be used, as long as there is one word per line. Feel free to create
your own custom word list and use it instead. The word list does not have to
be sorted in any particular way.
FILES¶
/usr/share/games/wordplay/words721.txt
Default word list file.
DISTRIBUTION¶
This program was written for fun and is free. Distribute it as you please, but
please distribute the entire package, with the original words721.txt and the
readme file. If you modify the code, please mention my name in it as the
original author. Please send me a copy of improvements you make, because I may
include them in a future version.
AUTHOR¶
Wordplay was written by Evans A Criswell <criswell@cs.uah.edu>
This man page was written by Joey Hess <joeyh@debian.org>