Some of my favorite pairs from the big list:<p>misrelation / orientalism; superintended / unpredestined; incorporate / procreation (don't mind if i do!); predators / teardrops (a cause and effect); counteridea / reeducation (a bit synonymous); streamlined / derailments (quite opposite!); truculent / unclutter; colonialist / oscillation; renavigate / vegetarian; persistent / prettiness; paternoster / penetrators (hmm); obscurantist / subtractions; nectarines / transience (a story of ripeness); definability / identifiably; indiscreet / iridescent; excitation / intoxicate; discounter / reductions (how logical!)<p>One small suggestion I have: add a point for pairs with different starting letters, and another point for pairs with different ending letters.
I'm a non-coding lurker here, but the only thing that ever motivated me to write my own program was to solve the newspaper anagram puzzle, "Jumble", faster than my wife. I wrote it in Basic, then re-wrote it in assembly language, I forget when. Then in Fortran while home bound during the first summer of the pandemic - to atone for my past sin of neglecting to learn Fortran when I had a chance in the late 1960's.
That was pretty good for a one-word anagram. Back in the 1990s I wrote a program that generated anagrams for longer phrases and I was surprised to find these prescient ones:<p>Saddam Hussein = He damns Saudis<p>Charles Manson = Slasher con man<p>David Letterman = Dead mitral vent<p>Mary Jo Kopechne = My joke chaperon *<p>Benito Mussolini = So, I bout Leninism<p>Lee Harvey Oswald = Oe, why ever Dallas? *<p>* "Chaperon" is a valid alternate spelling of "chaperone"<p>** Yes, "oe" is a word
This is great! It reminds me of a Tom7 video of a similar ilk: Anagrams, but where you can break apart letters: "Anagraphs" - <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTBAW-Eh0tM">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTBAW-Eh0tM</a>.<p>Similar to this, he produces a standard form for each word, but breaks each letter into letter pieces or 'atoms' which gives much more freedom for moving between words.<p>Definitely give it a watch. If you are not familiar with Tom7's videos, he has a hilarious whimsical style while also bringing to life completely out there ideas with some brilliant technical skill.
Don't forget the utterly classic anagrams we made out of "Information Superhighway" when that term was first introduced to a skeptical public.<p><a href="https://ad1c.us/infobahn.htm" rel="nofollow">https://ad1c.us/infobahn.htm</a>
I thought integrals / triangles was much more interesting, despite the shorter length. None of the other long pairs have any meaningful relationship, except for maybe excitation / intoxicate
Megachiropterans are fruit bats. They are <i>really</i> stinking adorable, especially when compared to smaller insect-eating bats, and for that reason are sometimes called flying foxes. In short, they make good subjects for cinematographers.
What’s nostalgic to me is that this is such a classic Perl pattern: hashing manipulated strings to find relationships. Prior to Perl doing this was painful. Boost wasn’t a thing. Python was in its cradle and Java was still struggling with beans. Perl removed the barriers between complex coding ideas and an implementation that C wasn’t ready for. The time from thought to prototype was near instant compared to current compiled languages.
Quick shout out to the New York Times game "Spelling Bee". It involves making lots of words from 6 letters plus 1 mandatory letter.<p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/puzzles/spelling-bee" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/puzzles/spelling-bee</a>
I wonder whether someone made a similar effort for finding the "most rhyming" words in English. Of course, since this would be based on sound, it would need to incorporate additional information besides spelling.
Previously on HN:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13696196" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13696196</a><p>Response by the author:<p><a href="https://blog.plover.com/lang/anagram-scoring-3.html" rel="nofollow">https://blog.plover.com/lang/anagram-scoring-3.html</a>
While I personally agree with the end result - cinematographer megachiropteran possibly being the best anagram, its worth exploring other scoring mechanisms I suppose - some kind of alliteration / cadence score to quantify how the words roll in succession. Maybe throw in semantic distance as well using clip embeddings probably to quantify the surprise element (or closeness for that matter). Gonna play around with this and see what I can do.
In a book release event for Stefan Fatsis's book on tournament Scrabble players, Word Freak, the host posed the "megachiropteran" anagram as a trivia question for a book giveaway.<p>One of the top players in my club _instantly_ replied "cinematographer," and added, "but megachiropteran isn't in the OSPD [Official Scrabble Players' Dictionary], so it doesn't really count."
For any Spanish speakers in here, I got inspired by this and borrowed Mark Dominus' code to find the "best anagram" in Spanish, my results are here: <a href="https://github.com/pilaf/anagramas">https://github.com/pilaf/anagramas</a><p>And here are the top scorers:<p>11 actinometro / cortamiento<p>11 aeronáutico / ecuatoriano<p>11 anemometría / mareamiento<p>11 apriscadero / esparcidora<p>11 arremetimiento / meritoriamente<p>11 atrasamiento / metatarsiano<p>11 camastronería / sacramentario<p>11 entropezada / panderetazo<p>11 importación / piromántico<p>12 anemométrica / maceramiento
One of the longest anagrams I know that doesn't involve obscure medical words is "astronomers" and "moon starers." Both of these phrases contain the same letters but in a different order, making them anagrams of each other. This anagram contains 11 letters and is quite interesting, as both phrases relate to looking up at the night sky and studying celestial bodies.<p>ChatGPT
There's something magically target-rich about anagrams.<p>My full first, middle and last name is long enough with common letters that there are several uproariously serendipitous and embarrassingly obscene (even for me) anagrams of my full name.<p>So bad I would never post them here. Much worse than you could possibly imagine. Take my word for it: you don't want to know.<p>The only advice I'll share is that parents should carefully screen their baby names with the advanced anagram server, and choose short names with unusual letters that have lower chances of backfiring.<p><a href="https://wordsmith.org/anagram/advanced.html" rel="nofollow">https://wordsmith.org/anagram/advanced.html</a>
<a href="https://wordsmith.org/anagram/" rel="nofollow">https://wordsmith.org/anagram/</a> is nice for finding multi-word anagrams, and it has a hall of fame link also.
<i>Megachiropteran</i> lit up <i>helicopter</i> for me (as soon as he worte it means mega-bat) and chiro- naturally zing'd the word chiropractor. First guess was 'opter'/'opter' must have something to do with flight and the o is shared as a connective and it means 'bone-flying'. Wrong: turns out <i>-pter</i> is Latin for 'wing', and so we have helico(l)-pter (helix-wing) and our featherless friends are chiro-pter (hand-wing).
This is linked from a link, and describes anagrams being used to prove you were the first discoverer of something: <a href="https://spark.iop.org/puzzle-hookes-law#:~:text=When%20Hooke%20first%20announced%20his,the%20extension%2C%20so%20the%20weight" rel="nofollow">https://spark.iop.org/puzzle-hookes-law#:~:text=When%20Hooke...</a>.
Shameless plug:<p><a href="https://github.com/dfhoughton/ranagrams">https://github.com/dfhoughton/ranagrams</a><p>I find it a good time killer. Note, there's a word list in the repo, but `crate install ranagrams` starts you off without a word list.
<p><pre><code> Qui suis-je ?
Me voici Sultan !
Nuitisme vocal
Silice mouvant
Io, vent musical !
Le voici musant
Mot inclus à vie
Ce motival insu
Là vous émincit
Cultivons amie
Si il vaut ce nom
Son val muet ici
Indice:
Si nul vice à mot
Vu ici slame ton
Nom c'est via lui
Vaincu tel, omis
Who am I?
Here I am, Sultan!
Vocal nightism
Moving silica
Io, musical wind!
Here it is, musing
Word included for life
This unknown motive
There, it slices you down
Let's cultivate, friend
If it's worth that name
Its silent valley here
Hint:
If no word vice
Seen here, slams your
Name, it's through it
Defeated as such, omitted</code></pre>
I think the best anagrams are the ones that create meaningful phases, I would probably train a SVM or a simple linear layer on BERT (or other encoder) embeddings and use it to score the results.
Link didn’t work for me. Here is a mirror:<p><a href="http://archive.today/vyp1c" rel="nofollow">http://archive.today/vyp1c</a>
one thing i miss from the "olden" days is the fun we used to have coming up with unassisted anagram discoveries and sharing them with each other. i think my personal favourite was antipyretic/pertinacity
Tldr:<p>Rewrite all words so the letters in each word are rearranged alphabetically. Don't do this other thing suggested on StackExchange<p>Look at the list of anagrams<p>Recognize that the list is actually boring<p>Get silly with words and nerd out<p>The end!
> I wouldn't have mentioned this, but someone on StackExchange actually asked this question.<p>I wonder if the author realizes how condescending this is.