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For those of us who enjoy wordplay, Mark Dominus' blog post about the best english language anagram is great fun.
A few years ago I mentioned in passing that in the 1990s I had constructed a listing of all the anagrams in Webster's Second International dictionary. (The Webster's headword list was available online.)
[...] The list starts with aal ala and ends with zolotink zolotnik which exemplify the problems with this simple approach: many of the 46,351 anagrams are obvious, uninteresting or even trivial. There must be good ones in the list, but how to find them?
I looked in the list to find the longest anagrams, but they were also disappointing: cholecystoduodenostomy duodenocholecystostomy
[...] This example made clear at least one of the problems with boring anagrams: it's not that they are too short, it's that they are too simple. Cholecystoduodenostomy and duodenocholecystostomy are 22 letters long, but the anagrammatic relation between them is obvious[.]
This gave me the idea to score a pair of anagrams according to how many chunks one had to be cut into in order to rearrange it to make the other one. On this plan, the "cholecystoduodenostomy / duodenocholecystostomy" pair would score 3, just barely above the minimum possible score of 2. Something even a tiny bit more interesting, say "abler / blare" would score higher, in this case 4. Even if this strategy didn't lead me directly to the most interesting anagrams, it would be a big step in the right direction, allowing me to eliminate the least interesting.
The method and results are laid out in the source post.
For those who don't wish to read the source post, his best pairing is cinematographer megachiropteran.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 5, Interesting) by FatPhil on Thursday February 23 2017, @05:29AM
To those of us who dabble in anagrams (my g/f & I are still two of the few regulars on alt.anagrams on - gasp! - usenet), the most important thing is the semantic element. However, to quote the a.a. FAQ ( http://www.theanna.org/grams/faq.html ), the idea of complexity being better that simplicity, with regard to the permutation required, is touched upon a couple of times:
"""
1.5 What is the longest one-word anagram?
Which is the longest anagram of a single word into another single word depends on the amount of transposition of letters that is acceptable and also whether using rather contrived technical, scientific, or medical names is acceptable.
According to the Guinness Book of Records, the longest non-scientific English words that form anagrams are the 18-letter ones below; however, they require no more than a simple swap of two letters.
"conversationalists = conservationalists"
The longest scientific anagram is 27 letters, but this involves just the simple movement of one letter.
"Hydroxydeoxycorticosterones = Hydroxydesoxycorticosterone."
Our list of 12- to 17-letter words that can be anagrammed into another word was compiled by William Tunstall-Pedoe and Larry Brash. Being on the list requires that no more than three consecutive letters from the original be repeated in sequence in the anagram, but the list does include unusual or technical words. It can be found here ( http://www.theanna.org/grams/12to17.html ).
"""
"""
2.2 What are the hallmarks of a good anagram?
[...]
(5) Avoidance of repetition of words in original phrase. Repeating a key word from the original in its anagram detracts from the cleverness of the result. The repetition of 'the' and other short non-key words is quite OK, of course. Occasionally, the repetition is acceptable. Such an anagram is sometimes referred to as a parallelogram.
"These girls are barely legal" =
"The "girls" are really beagles." -- repetition is used for a funny effect.
(Richard Grantham, 2000)
"""
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by TGV on Thursday February 23 2017, @07:26AM
> There's no unique best weight function.
That's the only correct answer. "Best" here means something along the lines of "what surprises people most". But not everybody has the same appreciation for anagrams. Some people like anagrams that yield related words, others anagrams that are "as mixed as possible". And depending on how you define "mixed", palindromes are then the most interesting anagrams, which is not what most people consider very interesting anagrams. To solve it, the whole issue boils down to understanding human cognition, aka strong AI. In practice, however, nearly every measure yields comparable results. In the late 80s, I "compiled" a book on anagrams on a VAX, and number of overlapping trigrams as a measure was good enough for me.
There are also other issues. The article mentions notaries/senorita as an interesting anagram, but knowing a bit of Spanish, I cringe at the omission of the tilde over the n. Then there is the issue that certain letter pairs (or even triplets) are nearly inseparable. The best English example I can think of right now is "qu": it's nearly impossible to find an anagram where they don't move together, making it reasonable to treat this as an almost single character. Information theory is pretty relevant here too.