is there a web site where you can enter letters and it tells you what
words can be constructed by rearanging those letters?

Hello from Google!

There are any number of websites that will rearrange letters to create
new words, or anagrams (from the Greek, "anagrammatismos", "to
rearrange letters in a word") for you. The Internet Anagram Server (or
"I, Rearrangement Servant", if you prefer) is one I can personally
recommend:

http://www.wordsmith.org/anagram/

The number of letters you can type in varies depending on the number
of people currently using the site, but at time of writing it allowed
up to 26 letters. This site also allows you to specify a particular
word to include or exclude, the maximum number of words found and can
also generate anagrams in German, Spanish, French or Italian. This is
probaly the best site, but the sheer number of results it usually
returns means you may have to spend a bit of time fine-tuning if you
want to get something really memorable.

Andy's Anagram Server, at 
http://www.ssynth.co.uk/~gay/anagram.html
allows you to specify the size of the dictionary referred to when
creating anagrams. It also allows anagrams in Dutch and French. This
site places no limit on the number of letters; however, it stops
calculating after 12 seconds, so if you give too long a phrase it will
time out before finding any results.

The Anagram Genius Server, at
http://www.anagramgenius.com/server.html
is a cut-down online version of a commercially-available piece of
software. It's designed solely for creating humorous anagrams from
people's names and is very versatile - you can specify whether the
resulting anagram should be flattering or satirical, whether it should
include or exclude offensive words, and whether the person in question
is involved with business, computing or politics. However, it doesn't
create anagrams instantly but emails them to you, which can take
several minutes depending on site traffic.

Perhaps because it's a fairly simple program to write, many people
have coded their own anagram generators, so any search will return a
lot of results. The sites I've listed here are all very good and
versatile, however.

Search terms used:

"Anagram"
://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=anagram&btnG=Google+Search

"Anagram Generator"
://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=anagram+generator

Hope this helps!

jeeagle-ga

---

Clarification of Answer by jeeagle-ga on 15 May 2002 14:53 PDT

Sorry, perhaps I should have specified: If you're working on a
crossword or playing Scrabble, and you want to come up with a single
word, the Internet Anagram Server allows you to specify a maximum
number of words in the answer. Set this to 1 and it will come up with
a one-word answer.

hi r2!

I found a few sites that will "Descramble" words:

The best one I found is at concordance.com, a site containing
searchable full texts of lots of books and plays.  It also contains
puzzles & puzzle helpers:
( http://www.concordance.com/unscrambler.htm )
This will give you a list of possibilities, with the most likely at
the top.

One of the more popular Descramblers is "The Scrabble Descrambler": 
( http://www.logophilia.com/descrabbler/top.asp )
The snag is that it will only allow a maximum of 7 letters to be
descrambled.

Here's another descrambler, created by Jason Nussbaum & his wife,
owners of a personal site:
( http://www.jasonnussbaum.com/galleries/pages/descrambler.shtml )
The catch with this one is that you have to keep ckicking on the
Descramble button to click through all the possible combinations until
you get to one that makes sense.

I hope this gives you what you need.  Happy descrambling!


I searched for:

descrambler word ( ://www.google.com/search?q=descrambler+word&site=swr&hl=en&start=10&sa=N
)

unscramble ( ://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&q=unscramble
)

Hi R2,

In case you're working the Scrabble angle:

http://www.boulter.com/scrabble
http://www.yahoo.com/Recreation/Games/Board_Games/Scrabble

p.s.  On your other "seminar" question, I also like "colloquipartee." 
It has a quasi-festive feel to it, doesn't it?


Out in left field,
V

Here's another two:

http://www.easypeasy.com/cgi-bin/anagrams/wordsearch/

http://www.easypeasy.com/cgi-bin/anagrams/r-us.pl?shortest=1&must=1&maxwords=1&DICTIONARY=full

Tom

Hi r2!

If you happen to be a Boggle fan and need to see how many words can be
made from block of letters arranged in a 5x5, 6x6, etc. square, then
the following site has a neat java applet that works amazingly well.

http://www.cs.georgetown.edu/~treuilla/tangle/jared/

Thought this might be the direction you were going...
Hope it helps!

Pinky-ga