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Large Anagram Families – Potential Scrabble Words

Continuing the theme of our prior post, here are a couple of the larger anagram families we’ve found in the Enable dictionary (used for online scrabble games and hangman games). Note: a few of the words in these sets are unusual words, so take the time to look them up before playing them in a game…

By anagram familes, we are talking about groups of words which are anagrams of each other – if you have the letters for one word, you have the letters for the others. For those of you who play Scrabble, these are a good source of word ideas.

For those of you who want to have a little fun, how many anagrams of each of the following can you name?

  • Spare
  • Alerts
  • Earrings
  • Aspen
  • Parsec

[Answers After The Break – Stop Here If You’re Trying To Guess The Words]

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Introducing “Anagram Families”

One of the things that sparked my interest in this site was the idea of “anagram families”, sets of words where the members are direct anagrams of each other. Fortunately, it’s relatively easy to write a Python program to crunch through a dictionary (I’m using Enable as my primary dictionary for this project, although others exist – results will vary) and identify sets of related words.

A simple example is GOAT, which is a direct anagram of TOGA. Makes you wonder exactly how wild those ancient parties got.

You can also have indirect anagrams – where you split the original word into multiple words. WINE => WE IN, clearly a reference of the bonding value of drinking with your clients and prospects. In contrast BEER => BE ER, a ominous note. So the next time you’re trying to close a deal, break out the good stuff!

Scotch was a non-starter – no direct anagrams and the single vowel made it hard to build a set of indirect anagrams. I tried a couple of other forms of hard liquor with similar results.

To play along at home, you can use our Scrabble Helper – enter the letters in the word you are interested in and look at the items on the list of possible words which use all the letters in your hand.