
Anagram Scoring - oli5679
http://blog.plover.com/2017/02/21/#anagram-scoring
======
DonHopkins
It's uncanny some of the acronyms you can find in "advanced mode" at
[https://wordsmith.org/anagram/advanced.html](https://wordsmith.org/anagram/advanced.html)
:

First find some good words in a couple of short phrases:

Y Combinator: Combat Irony, Romantic Boy, Acronym Obit, Bay Moron Tic, Not Bay
Micro, A Brim Tycoon, A Born Comity, My Bacon Riot, Into My Cobra, Tiny Crab
Moo

Hacker News: She Knew Arc, Knew Search, Whack Sneer, Cranks Whee!!! (emphasis
added ;), Shaken Crew, Ashen Wreck, Answer Heck, Rewash Neck, Eschew Nark,
Rakes Wench, Swank Cheer, Ark Wenches, Warn Cheeks, A Neck Shrew, Wrecks a
Hen, Knew Re Cash

Then put them together and enter your favorite words into "Anagrams must
include this word" (or manually remove the letters of the words you want to
keep if it says the input is too long):

Y Combinator Hacker News:

New Mob Cash Racket Irony

I'm sure there are more, but I'm just going to stop right there!

EDIT: I just can't stop!

Tricky Wannabe Moochers, Cannabis Coworker Thyme, Cybernetics Nohow Karma,
Wacko Minty Abhorrences, Betcha Wonkier Acronyms, Wacko Cerebration Hymns,
Romantic Wonky Breaches, Beckons Worthy American, Inaner Worthy Comebacks,
Chicken Anatomy Browser, Antiwar Cockney Hombres, Awaken Botcher Cronyism,
Obscene Wonky Matriarch, Nonsmoker Raceway Bitch...

~~~
theoh
"Chicken Anatomy Browser" sounds like a really dull pedagogical tool, maybe a
90s CDROM...

~~~
DonHopkins
It's like Uber for Haruspex!

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haruspex](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haruspex)

~~~
theoh
These are the days!

"Chinese Restaurant is not the only game on display in the “game emporium”
explored by Pikul and Geller in eXistenZ. Other titles include Hit by a Car
and Viral Ecstasy."

------
DonHopkins
The Internet Anagram Server at
[https://wordsmith.org/anagram/advanced.html](https://wordsmith.org/anagram/advanced.html)
has an "advanced" mode that you can use to incrementally refine long anagrams
once you find juicy words, by entering the words you want to keep in the
"Anagrams must include this word" field.

I'll bet dollars for donuts that nobody can find any worse anagrams for their
own full name than I've found for my own, "Donald Edward Hopkins":

The "clean" runner up is:

"Dank Washed Dildo Porn"

But the winner is:

"We Shank Dildo Porn Dad"

~~~
BurningFrog
I have a competitively bad one, but I don't want to reveal my name here.

~~~
nippoo
(That's what throwaways are for!)

~~~
OJFord
Next post: "Good idea, okay throwaway account but me here, result is ..."

~~~
BurningFrog
Yeah, that train has sailed...

------
tyingq
The last time this was posted, I scored his list with Levenshtein edit
distance. It was, predictably, not as good at bubbling up the best anagrams.
His winner scored 11, so still somewhat near the top, but not standing out as
well.

[https://gist.github.com/anonymous/431b163b2a2d532bfd0a3bdcc7...](https://gist.github.com/anonymous/431b163b2a2d532bfd0a3bdcc711f7b3)

~~~
asragab
Actually, I think you did alright, especially given you found

11 counteridea reeducation

Which is not only anagrammatic morphologically but perhaps conceptually in
some way in that counterideas are "mixed" into reeducation?

It would be interesting to find other anagrams that also share some
relationship semantically.

~~~
make3
that's almost too good, even if there was going to be something this good just
by sheer quabtity.. it almost sounds like the Newspeak stuff from 1984

~~~
asragab
I think you mean "double plus good" or "Debugs Loud Loop"!

------
chiliap2
This blog post inspired me to do a similar analysis using Urban Dictionary
words instead: [https://medium.com/@carnye/the-funniest-anagrams-of-urban-
di...](https://medium.com/@carnye/the-funniest-anagrams-of-urban-
dictionary-583fdb89d8e6)

~~~
mjd
I enjoyed this a lot. Thanks for doing it.

Code for scoring anagrams according to my method is at
[https://github.com/mjdominus/anagram-
scoring](https://github.com/mjdominus/anagram-scoring) if you would like to
use that.

------
jimmytucson
Perl was the first programming language I learned. I spent about 2 years
writing programs in it and studying it exclusively. Nowadays I don't use it at
all. However, if I had chosen another language first then I never would have
read Higher Order Perl -- truly one of the most brain-wrinkle-inducing books
I've ever read, and loaded with examples of beautiful code (in Perl, no
less!). Can't recommend it enough.

~~~
i336_
It gets even better, apparently!

[http://hop.perl.plover.com/book/](http://hop.perl.plover.com/book/)

> _This is the publisher 's own PDF proof of the second version, which was
> sent to the printers in August 2005._

> _This is better than the bootleg copies available from download sites (...):
> It is the complete text of the second printing, which incorporates many
> minor corrections; the bootleg copies are all bootlegs of the first
> printing._

> _Higher-Order Perl is not in the public domain and is not available under a
> free license of any sort. I distribute it from this web site by virtue of
> special permission from the publisher._

> _You may download the book for your personal use, but you may not distribute
> it to other people, either individually or by uploading it to a file-sharing
> service._

FWIW, IMO anyone who wants to build an EPUB has all the tools and data they
need to make a perfect rendition, and from reading that web page I think the
author would be very receptive (and make it available from his site).

~~~
mjd
I would like that, and if someone built an EPUB I would host it on my site.

------
kccqzy
I think it can be much more interesting if these anagrams are not just limited
to single words, but whole phrases or sentences. Makes the search a lot harder
I think, but the results are much more fun. I especially like authors who
incorporate those linguistic tricks in their works like "Vivian
Darkbloom"/"Vladimir Nabokov" or "Tom Marvolo Riddle"/"I Am Lord Voldemort".

~~~
dandelany
Years ago I discovered "Britney Spears"/"Presbyterians" and it remains one of
my faves.

~~~
mjd
My current favorite is “Cheryl Burke” / “huckleberry”.

(Cheryl Burke is one of the professional dancers on _Dancing with the Stars_.)

------
hkmurakami
fwiw, here is the discussion from the 2 months ago when this was submitted
(renamed "Anagram Scoring")
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13696196](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13696196)

------
sytse
an·a·gram ˈanəˌɡram/ noun a word, phrase, or name formed by rearranging the
letters of another, such as cinema, formed from iceman.

funny that the textbook definition of anagram is the word that is the basis of
the winner here: cinematographer

------
cody8295
I think 'clitoridean directional' is a clear winner

------
i336_
Some time ago I iterated through all the links at
[http://storage.googleapis.com/books/ngrams/books/datasetsv2....](http://storage.googleapis.com/books/ngrams/books/datasetsv2.html)
to get their Content-Length. All up it's 21TB _compressed_. Just US English
comes in at about 9GB or something though IIRC (unsure, might be completely
wrong).

With this being said, the data is very, very _very_ raw and unprocessed
(contains things like "xxiv_DET", "X25.000_NOUN", "X1E", "X16_NUM" etc, just
to give some random examples from the Xs). Would be a lot of work to sanitize
it, but you might get some interesting results in the process.

So IOW this would be somewhere between "toy" and "interestingness from chaos".

------
karyon
previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13696196](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13696196)

------
transposed
That is very cool. I am the type of person who enjoys anagrams, and started
toying around in Python ([http://adamantine.me/index.php/2016/09/02/python-
anagram-tut...](http://adamantine.me/index.php/2016/09/02/python-anagram-
tutorial/)), but I never thought of rating the anagrams... My next step was to
generate a list of names that are anagrams of other names, or take the corpus
of The Dark Tower series and see if you can discover any interesting anagrams
(as it is a motif in the series).

------
donquichotte
Nice write-up, especially the comparison of rearranging letters and computing
every permutation of a list to find d the one that is sorted.

BTW, my favourite anagram in German: Zitronensaft - Fronteinsatz (lemon juice
- service at the front (mil))

------
briandrupieski
If you're interested in more anagrams I wrote a Twitter bot that finds
anagrams in pairs of tweets from a sample of the Twitter firehose:
[https://twitter.com/anagrammatweest](https://twitter.com/anagrammatweest)

It can be easier to see the pairs in the tumblr feed:
[http://anagrammatweest.tumblr.com/](http://anagrammatweest.tumblr.com/)

The source is here:
[https://github.com/bdrupieski/AnagramFinder](https://github.com/bdrupieski/AnagramFinder)

------
bitwize
It's worth noting that megachiroptera are _fruit_ bats. And they are adorable:
[https://youtu.be/t26UZM70YzY](https://youtu.be/t26UZM70YzY)

------
oska
Whenever I walk past a sign in front of a house advertising that it will soon
be up for auction, I rearrange the letters to spell caution. (Especially with
the overinflated house prices in Australia currently).

------
ShannonAlther
Another 14-pointer which was overlooked:

 _nitromagnesite_ <\--> _regimentations_

------
defined
My second-most favorite pair of anagrams after the movie-showing giant bat is
_coprophagist topographics_.

Detailed maps of areas in which dung-eaters live? Worth buying just to avoid
the neighborhood... :)

Edit: These anagram pairs would also make interesting Short Authentication
Strings for ZRTP. Worthy of a Monty Python skit, if you ask me.

------
raldi
Might be interesting to give bonus points to pairs of words with origins far
apart on the linguistic taxonomy.

~~~
Darthy
Yes. I think there are multiple scales to give words or pairs bonus points on:

\- there is also a moral outrage scale where you want at least one word to be
on (if one word of the pair was about sex and the other one was about the
church, that would be great and funny).

\- then there is also a boringness scale (boring: "habitat", not boring:
"shebang"), where you ideally want both words to score highly.

\- then there is also a understandability scale. "cholecystoduodenostomy" is a
bad word because very few people know what it means. Lower this down until you
understand all the words and the result will be much more satisfactory.

~~~
raldi
I guess this is why people love the "Britney Spears" / "Presbyterians" one.

------
kpil
So the best anagrams in English are actually Greek (?)

"Soapstone teaspoons" is 80% old English with a splash of Chinese.

Interestingly, most germanic words seems to be rather short. But I guess the
reason for using long Greek, Latin or French words is to look important, so
the longer the better.

------
rimliu
I still have this that I wrote years ago:

    
    
        for(<>){chop;$s{join'',sort split'',lc}.=" $_"}for(sort%s){/. /&&print"$_\n"}
    

Feed it a wordlist and it spews out anagrams.

------
logicallee
But who has heard of a megachiropteran? (In fact, as I write this my browser
has a red squiggly line under it.)

I like some of the other anagrams the author has listed better. For example,
an anagram of "negativism" is "timesaving".

That's deep.

~~~
ufo
Perhaps this is less known with the tech crowd but I'd expect most people who
are familiar with zoology to understand what megachiropteran means. Though it
might be more common to hear the colloquial term "megabat" and "microbat"
instead of the official term.

~~~
logicallee
thanks - that's interesting. so I suppose when you saw the 14-character
anagram on the page, you were like, "nice."

~~~
ufo
Yup. And it helps that fruit bats are adorable.

------
DanBC
There were some comments in this thread:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13696196](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13696196)

------
AceyMan
My alma mater's Ultimate Frisbee team were called the 'Earthworms,' an anagram
of the school name(1).

Which was cool.

1—Finding said name is left as an exercise for the reader.

~~~
handsomechad
Swarthmore

------
ma2rten
I feel like anagram quality should include other things as well, like how
common the words are.

~~~
knome
It says that near the conclusion of the article.

------
Pxtl
I'd skip the dictionary and scrape all of Wikipedia, then weigh words by
frequency.

~~~
bemmu
I tried finding anagrams from Wikipedia titles, didn't include the scoring
yet, but just browsing the results I notice things such as:

Hilda Davies <-> Sadia Dehlvi

Hilton Young <-> Tony Holguin

Hilary Corke <-> Karoly Reich

I don't know who these people are, but this could be a way to uncover
anagrammed pen names wholesale.

~~~
mjd
This is a great idea, thanks!

By my method, the top scorer is ACEEEFFGHHIILLMMNNOORRSSSTUV (25 points),
which is the pseudonym of 17th-century German writer Hans Jakob Christoffel
von Grimmelshausen. See if you can guess where he got his pseudonym.

After this there are a large number of high scorers, some very interesting,
some less so. I think my current favorite is “Atlantis Casino Resort Spa” /
“Carter assassination plot” (18 points) but it might be “Sunrise celebration”
/ “lesbian intercourse” (16).

The score file includes 1,657,148 (!) anagram pairs of which 26,296 have a
score of 10 or higher and 475 have a score of 15 or higher.

------
mproud
Competitive Scrabble players know just about all the 7- and 8-letter anagrams.

~~~
sverige
I know most of the 5- and 6-letter anagrams from years of doing the Jumble
puzzle every day. And I'm good at Scrabble, but not "competitive" good.

~~~
paulcole
Try:

[http://playrollo.com](http://playrollo.com)

Only 5-letter words with no repeating letters. Made it about 5 years ago when
I was learning JavaScript.

~~~
jcheng
That's really fun, thanks! Makes me want to write a solver...

~~~
paulcole
A guy I worked with did! Picking randomly from possible remaining answers,
you'll always get it in 7 (I think) guesses or less.

I also did a slack version my partner and I play together.

------
mgiannopoulos
>> 8 negativism timesaving

Negativism is timesaving? Mind blown :)

~~~
yabatopia
I found this the best anagram: short, comprehensible and philosophical all-in-
one.

Longer isn't always better. Sure, a giant bat is cool, but that's about it.
Clitoridean directional is funny for a few seconds, maybe longer if you're
stuck in puberty.

------
hatsunearu
Wait, so what can cinematographer megachiropteran be rearranged to be? is it
"GIANT BAT! DEATH FROM ABOVE!!!"?

~~~
muricula
There are no B's in cinematographer. Megachiropteran means giant bat
(mega=giant chiropteran= bat presumably).

~~~
ufo
(And they don't actually mean death from above, unless you are a tasty fruit)

------
andy_ppp
The best anagram in English is definitely "tapestries" ;-)

------
Sam_Harris
Hacker news: a never-ending festival of reposts.

