Anagram Finder

An anagram of a word or phrase is the result of rearranging its letters to form another meaningful word or phrase. For example, the an anagram of "anagram finder" is "garden in a farm" (work it out!).

Fourmilab's interactive anagram finder lets you explore acronyms for any phrase you wish. Unlike many other such resources on the Internet, our anagram finder is organised to help you find interesting and/or funny acronyms without searching through a vast lists composed mostly of obscure words you've never heard of.

Acronyms are generated in a four step process. First, you enter the word or phrase for which you're seeking the acronyms. This produces a list of words contained in acronyms of your word or phrase. Many of these words will be obscure or uninteresting, so at this stage you can filter them for further exploration. Selecting one of the words and submitting it proceeds to step 3, which shows you all the anagrams containing that word (there may, of course, only be one). You can then choose one of the anagrams and generate all of its permutations (all possible results of reordering words in the phrase). Phrases from the permuted results may then be copied and pasted into other documents.

Each step in the anagram generation process recapitulates (without recomputing) the earlier steps, so you can back up to any earlier step at any point in the process. The anagram finder is an application which runs on the Fourmilab server, so you don't need a fast computer or lots of memory to use it.

Anagrams are generated based on the official dictionary (second edition) of that crossword game whose name you cannot mention without having lawyers burst out of your screen brandishing menacing documents, courtesy of Grady Ward's Moby Words compilation. We search the dictionary in decreasing order of word length, as longer words tend to produce more interesting anagrams. Only alphabetic characters are considered in anagrams, and accented characters are "flattened" by removing the accents.

Step 1

Type the phrase for which you seek anagrams into the box below and press the "Submit" button to generate a list of words which appear in anagrams of this phrase.
Original phrase:  

 


by John Walker
March, 2002