Mitchell Szczepanczyk's Subanagram Generator

Fun With Language, December 8, 2002

In December 2001, I received an e-mail from my sister who teaches English to 5th and 6th grades. She e-mailed me to say that she gave her class the assignment to make as many different words as possible from the letters in the word "representative," and to ask me if I knew of any webpages that could automatically make a list of such "sub-anagrams." After a search of the web, I was unable to find such a page.

But I work in IT and I study computer science. So I wrote such a webpage. Here it is.

Type in a word or string in the input field below and click 'Find subanagrams'. You don't need to worry about typing in upper or lower case, but please be sure that whatever you type has no spaces and please be patient as it may take a bit of time.

I've put the source code for the subanagram script under a General Public License.

Update, December 8, 2002: I fixed a bug in the code on December 8, 2002. This bug prevented the correct search for multiple instances of the same letter, so that (for example) the word "bookkeeper" would not recognize "book" as a subanagram. Now it does.

Update, December 11, 2002: There is a bug regarding plurals that I don't think I will be able to fix anytime soon. One example was brought to my attention: the word "snowflakes" does not deliver the subanagram "snakes", even though it should. That's because "snakes" is not listed in the words file which the generator uses, even though "snake" is. I could fix the problem by either automating plurals (but that wouldn't work for irregular plurals like "feet"), or by noting the plural in the words file itself (but that's a LOT of work). Fixing either problem is more effort than I have time to spend. Unfortunately, I'll punt this, and simply note this problem and say "Caveat emptor".

Update, December 5, 2004: The subanagram script was moved to a new server, but the dictionary I had been using didn't come along for the ride. As a result, I've uploaded a new dictionary with a lot more words than previously-used dictionaries. (The new dictionary has 234,936 words; previously-used dictionaries had no more than 50,000 words.) As a result, some of the results may be differ from what came before, but hopefully it should be something of an improvement.

Update, June 9, 2007: After a move to yet another server, the subanagram generator didn't work for months, but I've fixed it so that it works again. Bonus bug fix: I've changed the sort of the numbered groups ("Words that are X letters long"), so that they're sorted in numerical order rather than by ASCII-sort order.