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>

                                          DECEMBER 1996                                    FOO(1)