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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: 2) by Jiro on Thursday February 23 2017, @05:48AM
Never mind, it's probably the same guy who put the entries in the FAQ, and this entry is already mentioned. I can't figure out how to delete this.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 23 2017, @09:09AM
I can't figure out how to delete this.
nn: While reading the message within the newsgroup, press C (Shift-c).
tin: While reading the message within the newsgroup, press D (Shift-d). You must be reading the message, not just have it highlighted on the article selection screen.
Trumpet: View the article, then, from the menus, select Article/Cancel.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 23 2017, @04:44PM
(from the Soylent News FAQ)
(Score: 2) by Jiro on Thursday February 23 2017, @06:35PM
I meant that I didn't know how to delete from Soylent News, not that I don't know how to delete from Usenet. I don't think we allow deletion here.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 25 2017, @03:51AM
Usenet is also called news. I was trying to make a joke.