xenial (1) wordplay.1.gz

Provided by: wordplay_7.22-17ubuntu1_amd64 bug

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)