FOO(1)								     Commands								    FOO(1)

NAME

       wordplay - anagram finder

SYNOPSIS

       wordplay string [-slxavnmd] [-w word] [-f wordfile]

DESCRIPTION

       wordplay is an anagram finder. What is an anagram?  Well, let's turn to Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, Tenth Edition:

       anagram:
	      a word or phrase made by transposing the letters of another word or phrase.

       Each letter in the anagram must appear with the same frequency as in the original string.

       For  example,  the  letters  in	the word "stop" can be rearranged to spell "tops" or "pots" or "sotp".	"sotp" is not a word and is not of
       interest when generating anagrams.  "stop" has four letters, so there are 24 ways to rearrange its letters.  However, very few of  the  re-
       arrangements actually spell words.

       Wordplay, by using a list of words, takes a specified string of letters and uses the list of words to find anagrams of the string.

       By the way, "Wordplay" anagrams to "Rowdy Pal", and the program really can live up to that particular anagram.  I have been able to come up
       with anagrams of most of my coworkers' names that are humorous, descriptive, satirical, or, occasionally, quite vulgar.

OPTIONS

       string String to be anagrammed.	This should be seen to the program as a single argument.  If you feel you must put spaces in  the  string,
	      under  UNIX, you will have to put backslashes in front of the spaces or just put the entire string in double quotes.  Just leave the
	      spaces out because the program throws them out anyway.

       -s     Silent operation.  If this option is used, the header and line numbers are not printed.  This is useful if you want  the	output	to
	      contain only the anagrams.  Use this option with the l (and x) option to generate a wordlist which can be piped or redirected.  This
	      option does not suppress error messages that are printed to stderr.  Finding zero anagrams is not an error.

       -l     Print list of candidate words before anagramming.  This is the list of words that can be spelled with the letters from the specified
	      string, with no letters being used more often that they appear in the input string.

       -x     Do not perform anagramming.  Use with l if you just want the candidate word list without anagrams.

       -a     Allow anagrams containing two or more occurrences of a word.

       -v     Consider strings with no vowels as candidate words and do not give up when there are no vowels remaining after extractions.

       -m     Limit  candidate	word length to a maximum number of letters.  Follow by an integer.  m12 means limit words to 12 letters.  m5 means
	      limit them to 5 letters.

       -n     Limit candidate word length to a minimum number of letters.  Follow by an integer.  n2 means limit words to 2  letters.	n11  means
	      limit them to 11 letters.

       -d     Limit  number  of  words	in  anagrams  to a maximum number.  Follow by an integer.  d3 means no anagrams should contain more than 3
	      words.  d12 means limit anagrams to 12 words.  This is currently the option that I recommend to limit output, since an  optimization
	      has been added to speed execution in some cases when this option is used.

       -w     Specify  a  word	which  should appear in all anagrams.  This is useful if you already have a word in mind that you want in the ana-
	      grams.  This option should be specified at the end of the command, followed by a space and the word to use.

       -f     Specify which word list to use.  See example!  This option should be specified at the end of the command, followed by  a	space  and
	      the alternate wordfile name.  This is useful if you have other word lists to try or if you are interested in making your own custom-
	      ized word list.  New feature:  Use a hyphen as the filename if the wordlist should be read from stdin.

EXAMPLES

       wordplay persiangulf
	      Anagram the string "persiangulf" .

       wordplay anagramming -lx
	      Print the list of words from the wordlist that can be spelled by using the letters from the word "anagramming".  A letter may not be
	      used more often than the number of times it occurs in the word "anagramming".  No anagrams are generated.

       wordplay tomservocrow -n3m8
	      Anagram the string "tomservocrow" .  Do not use words shorter than 3 letters or longer than 8 letters.

       wordplay persiangulf -ld3m10 -f /usr/share/dict/words
	      Print  the  candidate  words  for  the string "persiangulf".  Print anagrams containing up to 3 words, without considering any words
	      longer than 10 characters.  Use the file "/usr/share/dict/words" rather than "words721.txt".

       wordplay soylentgreen -n3w stolen -f w2
	      Print anagrams of "soylentgreen" containing the word "stolen" and use the file "w2" as the wordlist file.  Discard  candidate  words
	      shorter than 3 characters.

       wordplay university -slx
	      Print  the  candidate word list for the string "university".  The output will consist of just the words.	This output is more useful
	      for redirecting to a file or for piping to another program.

       wordplay trymeout -s
	      Anagram the string "trymeout" and print the anagrams with no line numbers.  The header will not be printed.  This is useful for pip-
	      ing  the	output	to  another  process  (or saving it to a file to be used by another program) without having to parse the output to
	      remove the numbers and header.

       wordplay trymeout -v
	      Anagram "trymeout" as usual, but in case vowel-free strings are in the wordlist, consider them as possible candidate words.

       cat wordlist1 wordlist2 wordlist3 | sort -u | wordplay trymeout -f -
	      Anagram "trymeout" and read the wordlist from stdin, so that, in this  case,  the  three	wordlists  "wordlist1",  "wordlist2",  and
	      "wordlist3" will be concatenated and piped into wordplay as the wordlist.  The "sort -u" is there to remove duplicate words from the
	      combined wordlist.

NOTES

       If the option specifiers are combined, as in "an7m7d5f" or "d3n5f", the f should come last, followed by a space and the word list file.

       The "w" option is used in the same manner.

       Limit the number of words to consider, if desired, using the n and m options, or better yet, use the d option to limit depth, when anagram-
       ming certain time-consuming strings.  The program is currently optimized to speed execution in some cases when the d option is used.

       It is highly recommended that the "words721.txt" file distributed with the program be used, since many nonsense two and three-letter combi-
       nations that are not words have been eliminated.  This makes the quality of the output slightly better and speeds execution of the  program
       a  slight bit.  Any word list may be used, as long as there is one word per line.  Feel free to create your own custom word list and use it
       instead.  The word list does not have to be sorted in any particular way.

FILES

       /usr/share/games/wordplay/words721.txt
	      Default word list file.

DISTRIBUTION

       This program was written for fun and is free.  Distribute it as you please, but please distribute the entire  package,  with  the  original
       words721.txt  and  the readme file.  If you modify the code, please mention my name in it as the original author.  Please send me a copy of
       improvements you make, because I may include them in a future version.

AUTHOR

       Wordplay was written by Evans A Criswell <criswell@cs.uah.edu>

       This man page was written by Joey Hess <joeyh@debian.org>

								   DECEMBER 1996							    FOO(1)