OddThinking

You only answered some of my questions. How did you come up with the list? A web page somewhere? Or did you write some code to process your dictionary? If so, let’s see it.

I wrote some Python code. I didn’t think it was particularly exciting, but here it is:

    longest_word_length = 20
    dict_path = r"wordlist.txt"

    anagram_map = dict(
        # Map from
        #     Word length
        #         -> sorted list of letters
        #              -> set of words with those letters
        [(length, dict()) for length in range(longest_word_length + 1)]
        )
    
    for line in file(dict_path, "r"):
        # Extract file word on line, letters only.
        first_word_extended = line.split(" ")[0]
        first_word_list = [
            letter
            for letter in first_word_extended
            if letter in "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ"
            ]
        first_word = ''.join(first_word_list)
        
        first_word_sorted_list = sorted(first_word_list)
        first_word_sorted = ''.join(first_word_sorted_list)
        first_word_length = len(first_word_sorted_list)
        
        if first_word_sorted not in anagram_map[first_word_length]:
            anagram_map[first_word_length][first_word_sorted] = set()
        anagram_map[first_word_length][first_word_sorted].add(first_word)
        
    # Words of length 1 and 2 can't have an interesting number of anagrams.
    for word_length in xrange(3, longest_word_length + 1):
        
        if anagram_map[word_length]:
            max_number_of_anagrams = max(
                [len(anagram_map[word_length][key])
                    for key in anagram_map[word_length]
                ])
            print (
                "There are at most %s anagrams for any word of length %s."
                % (max_number_of_anagrams, word_length)
                )
            if max_number_of_anagrams > 1:
                for key in anagram_map[word_length]:
                    if (
                        len(anagram_map[word_length][key])
                            == max_number_of_anagrams
                       ):
                        print "* " + (', '.join(anagram_map[word_length][key]))

The table would also be more useful if it included the count of anagrams for each of the words.

Aristotle, finally done.

🙂

Nice.