Anagram Scoring | Hacker News Reader

Anagram Scoring

blog.plover.com

295 pointsoli567977 comments

It's uncanny some of the acronyms you can find in "advanced mode" at 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...

At least a few of those sound like the could be fun band names.

"Wacko Celebration Hymns" will be the name of my next album.

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

It's like Uber for Haruspex!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haruspex

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."

> Hacker News: She Knew Arc

Poetic and true (if we're a little generous with gendered pronouns)

Yes I thought that was the best one actually! ;)

The Internet Anagram Server at 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"

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

Bong Furring?

(That's what throwaways are for!)

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

Yeah, that train has sailed...

I do a lot of multiword anagramming to set crossword clues, and I realised what I really wanted was a simple tool that would let me work out anagrams by hand, but do the bookkeeping for me. so I wrote it: http://martindemello.net/wgn.html

This tool is awesome!

The dirtiest anagram for my name I found is: "BRA EGG JOKE"

Still pretty harmless.

But this one is hilarious: "JAR BE KEG, GO!"

At my previous place of work, in a fit of post-modern, hipstery redesign, the hotel bar got a back-lit sign stating boldly:"NORMAL IS BORING" (And the reception area also got a life-size black plastic horse-lamp that apparently cost some 4-5000 euros[1]). My initial search turned up:"MINORS LABOURING" as a kind of suitable answer to this challenge. This was quickly spotted by the hotel manager, changed back with an accompanying angry post-it note stating: "Do not mess with the sign". My second attempt was more simple, and effective - changing the sign to read "BORING IS NORMAL". This more simple and true statement stayed up for a week or so before anyone noticed that the sign accurately reflected the corporate culture. It's since been changed back.

[1] https://www.connox.com/categories/lamps/floor-lamps/moooi-ho...

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...

That was one thing that came to my mind. I also wonder what it'd look like by minimizing LCS score of anagram pairs. Too lazy to code it right now though =/

Finding ones where the two words have some relation surfaced some interesting ones. I tried using Wordnet to do that.

Unfortunately, even after stemming them, most of the list wasn't in Wordnet, so the list is pretty short. The more interesting words are ones with a score lower than 1, so scroll down a bit: https://gist.github.com/anonymous/e69f448fa08481603d1ca77ea7...

Querying a thesaurus for some related words might have worked better.

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.

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

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

This sort is great but the longest ones are a mouthful and not that great. The middle part has quite some gems, though there are also a lot of uninteresting ones to weed out as they follow some swapping pattern:

    "$1$2$3$4" == "$3$2$1$4" if /^(.*)(o)(.*)(al|ist|is|ia|y)$/

Anyway, here goes my list!

09 "capernoited deprecation" sounds like something I could use daily!

09 "cinderous decursion" is sad but beautiful scenery.

09 "canopying poignancy" just breaks my heart.

10 "romanticise miscreation" is all about art.

09 "assorting organists" just sounds fun!

09 "exterminate antiextreme" is just extreme in its own way.

11 "paternalistic antiparticles" is terrific anthropomorphism.

09 "ancestorial lacerations". ouch.

09 "adsorbing signboard". I just read it as a pun merging "absorbing ad signboard"

09 "amortised mediators". Interesting because mediators act as dampers, and "amortir" in french means both "damping" and "amortising"

10 "presential interlapse" just flows.

10 "interlaced credential". Is that an encryption scheme?

08 "nightcap patching" is beautiful.

08 "timesaving negativism". Ha, you bet.

08 "supersonic percussion". Boom.

08 "unsoiled delusion". That one's beautiful, like a Chiaroscuro.

08 "latescent tentacles", Cthulhu or something

08 "voidless dissolve", Cthulhu or something

08 "misnomed demonism", Cthulhu or something

07 "relating triangle". Did anyone play Thomas Was Alone?

10 "postmineral trampolines". I don't know, but it involves trampolines.

Even in the smaller values there are some good ones that don't sound like anagrams.

06 "trashed threads". A though for you, C++ and Java folks.

06 "tipful uplift". Now, that's the spirit!

06 "straying stingray". Works for both the 'vette and the sea-farer.

06 "monetize timezone". People are evil, sometimes doubly so.

But the best one to me (probably because it resonates deeply with my recent personal situation) is:

06 "ideals sailed". So long.

In case you misted it, I mentioned your success with Levenshtein-per-unit-length in one of the followup articles. (http://blog.plover.com/lang/anagram-scoring-3.html) Thanks for looking into this so thoroughly.

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...

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 if you would like to use that.

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.

It gets even better, apparently!

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).

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

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".

I wrote a tool to help with finding good anagrams of the multi-word sort by a semi-automated process. It is limited to anagrams of 15 letters or less, but useful for finding multi-word anagrams from names.

http://tomcdonnell.net/submodules/anagram_checker/

I used it to find anagrams of my coworker's names for a weekend project.

http://tomcdonnell.net/submodules/anagram_game/

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

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

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

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

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

I think 'clitoridean directional' is a clear winner

Some time ago I iterated through all the links at http://storage.googleapis.com/books/ngrams/books/datasetsv2.... 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".

previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13696196

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...), 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).

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))

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

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

The source is here: https://github.com/bdrupieski/AnagramFinder

It's worth noting that megachiroptera are fruit bats. And they are adorable: https://youtu.be/t26UZM70YzY

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).

Another 14-pointer which was overlooked:

nitromagnesite <--> regimentations

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Yup. And it helps that fruit bats are adorable.

There were some comments in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13696196

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.

Swarthmore

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

It says that near the conclusion of the article.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Try:

http://playrollo.com

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

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

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.

When I was playing fairly seriously, a handful of people were seriously studying 9s.

I gave up at being 100% on 5s, 95% on 7s, and 80% on 8s. For someone like myself who's not a naturally talented anagrammer, the workload to just maintain what I had learned got to be too much.

>> 8 negativism timesaving

Negativism is timesaving? Mind blown :)

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.

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

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

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

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

Hacker news: a never-ending festival of reposts.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com