anagramming

Anagramming is the activity of rearranging the letters of a word, phrase, or sequence of characters to produce a new word or phrase, using all the original letters exactly once. In practice, spaces, punctuation, and capitalization are usually ignored.

Origin and examples: The term derives from the Greek ana- meaning up or again and gramma meaning letter. Anagrams have appeared in literature and word games for centuries. Classic examples include listen and silent; dormitory and dirty room; rail safety and fairy tales.

Types and rules: A perfect anagram uses all letters to form a new phrase with the same letter counts. Partial or near-anagrams use only a subset of letters or alter counts. In puzzles, spaces and punctuation are typically ignored, and capitalization is disregarded. Some anagrams involve phrases, names, or thematic constraints; cryptic crosswords use indicators to signal that a segment of letters should be rearranged.

Applications and methods: Anagrams are common in word games, education, and entertainment, and appear in literature as wordplay. In computing, generating anagrams often involves permuting a multiset of letters and pruning impossible branches with a dictionary or hash table; the task can be computationally intensive for long inputs.

See also: wordplay, cryptography, anagram solver.

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