#cholecystoduodenostomy
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https://blog.plover.com/lang/anagram-scoring.html (Mark Dominus, 2017)
I found the best anagram in English...
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...This was easy to do, even at the time, when the word list itself, at 2.5 megabytes, was a file of significant size.
This article is about how I was unhappy with the results of the simple procedure above. From the Webster's Second list, which contains about 234,000 words, it finds about 14,000 anagram sets (some with more than two words), consisting of 46,351 pairs of anagrams. 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...
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...
Sorted by score, there were treasures at the end, and the clear winner was
14 cinematographer megachiropteran
I declare this the single best anagram in English. It is 15 letters long, and the only letters that stay together are the E and the R. There was another 14-pointer, but both its words are Webster's Second jargon that nobody knows:
14 rotundifoliate titanofluoride...
If you are the type of person who enjoys anagrams, the list rewards casual browsing. A few examples:
5 notaries senorita
6 yttrious touristy
7 admirer married
7 admires sidearm
8 negativism timesaving
8 peripatetic precipitate
8 scepters respects
8 shortened threnodes
8 soapstone teaspoons
9 earringed grenadier
9 excitation intoxicate
9 integrals triangles
9 ivoriness revisions
9 masculine calumnies
10 coprophagist topographics
10 chuprassie haruspices
10 citronella interlocal
11 clitoridean directional
11 dispensable piebaldness
38333 anagrams, scored
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