WORDPLAY(9)

📦 version 9.0.1, in ubuntu resolute, ubuntu stonking

👑 WORDPLAY — the anagram finder, bestie edition 💖

okay so real quick: this is the manual page for wordplay (that's the manual name, section 9, filed under Commands if you're being formal about it). She's an anagram finder. She's iconic. Let's go. 🦋

✨ NAME ✨

wordplay — anagram finder 💅

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

wordplay string [-silFxavnmd] [-w word] [-f wordfile]

🎀 DESCRIPTION 🎀

wordplay is an anagram finder. But like… what even is an anagram? Bestie, let's let Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, Tenth Edition do the talking:

anagram: a word or phrase made by transposing the letters of another word or phrase.

Each letter in the anagram has to show up with the same frequency as it does in the original string. No sneaking in extra letters, no cap. ✋

So like, the letters in the word "stop" can be rearranged to spell "tops" or "pots" or "sotp". And "sotp"? Not a word. Not of interest when we're generating anagrams. "stop" has four letters, so there are 24 ways to rearrange its letters — but like, very few of those rearrangements actually spell words. It's giving chaos, not vocabulary. 😭

What wordplay does is take a specified string of letters and use a list of words to find the anagrams of that string. That's the whole gig. She eats.

By the way? "Wordplay" anagrams to "Rowdy Pal", and this program really can live up to that particular anagram. The author has been able to come up with anagrams of most of his coworkers' names that are humorous, descriptive, satirical, or, occasionally, quite vulgar. 💀 Not me telling you the manpage admits this. It does. We love honesty.

💅 OPTIONS 💅

  • string — the string to be anagrammed. This should be seen by the program as a single argument. If you feel like you absolutely must put spaces in the string, under UNIX you'll have to put backslashes in front of the spaces, or just wrap the whole string in double quotes. Honestly? Just leave the spaces out — the program throws them out anyway. 🗑️
  • -s — Silent operation. With this one, the header and line numbers do not get printed. Super useful if you want the output to contain only the anagrams. Use it together with the l (and x) option to generate a wordlist you can pipe or redirect. Heads up: this option does not suppress error messages printed to stderr. And finding zero anagrams is not an error, bestie — it's just a quiet day. 🫶
  • -i — Allow the input string to appear in the list of anagrams. If you omit this option, the input will not be counted as an anagram. 🙈
  • -l — Print the list of candidate words before anagramming. This is the list of words that can be spelled with the letters from the specified string, with no letters being used more often than they appear in the input string. Main character list energy. 👑
  • -F — Uses /usr/share/dict/words as the wordlist instead of words721.txt. Glow-up wordlist fr fr. ⭐
  • -x — Do not perform anagramming. Use it with l if you just want the candidate word list without anagrams. Just the vibes, no anagrams. 🌈
  • -a — Allow anagrams containing two or more occurrences of a word. Double trouble, no cap. ✨
  • -v — Consider strings with no vowels as candidate words, and do not give up when there are no vowels remaining after extractions. Vowel-less and thriving. 🧚
  • -m — Limit candidate word length to a maximum number of letters. Follow it by an integer. m12 means limit words to 12 letters. m5 means limit them to 5 letters. 📏
  • -n — Limit candidate word length to a minimum number of letters. Follow it by an integer. n2 means limit words to 2 letters. n11 means limit them to 11 letters. 📐
  • -d — Limit the number of words in anagrams to a maximum number. Follow it by an integer. d3 means no anagrams should contain more than 3 words. d12 means limit anagrams to 12 words. This is currently the option the author recommends to limit output, since an optimization has been added to speed execution in some cases when this option is used. 🔥
  • -w — Specify a word which should appear in all anagrams. Useful if you already have a word in mind that you want in the anagrams. This option should be specified at the end of the command, followed by a space and the word to use. 🍓
  • -f — Specify which word list to use. See the example! This option should be specified at the end of the command, followed by a space and the alternate wordfile name. Useful if you have other word lists to try, or if you're interested in making your own customized word list. New feature: use a hyphen as the filename if the wordlist should be read from stdin. 🎀
  • -L — Specify a two letter language code. Useful if you have letters which require unusual normalization. This option currently supports a limited number of languages. 🌍

💖 EXAMPLES 💖

  • wordplay persiangulf Anagram the string "persiangulf" .
  • wordplay anagramming -lx Print the list of words from the wordlist that can be spelled by using the letters from the word "anagramming". A letter may not be used more often than the number of times it occurs in the word "anagramming". No anagrams are generated.
  • wordplay tomservocrow -n3m8 Anagram the string "tomservocrow" . Do not use words shorter than 3 letters or longer than 8 letters.
  • wordplay persiangulf -ld3m10 -f /usr/share/dict/words Print the candidate words for the string "persiangulf". Print anagrams containing up to 3 words, without considering any words longer than 10 characters. Use the file "/usr/share/dict/words" rather than "words721.txt".
  • wordplay soylentgreen -n3w stolen -f w2 Print anagrams of "soylentgreen" containing the word "stolen" and use the file "w2" as the wordlist file. Discard candidate words shorter than 3 characters.
  • wordplay university -slx Print the candidate word list for the string "university". The output will consist of just the words. This output is more useful for redirecting to a file or for piping to another program.
  • wordplay trymeout -s Anagram the string "trymeout" and print the anagrams with no line numbers. The header will not be printed. This is useful for piping the output to another process (or saving it to a file to be used by another program) without having to parse the output to remove the numbers and header.
  • wordplay trymeout -v Anagram "trymeout" as usual, but in case vowel-free strings are in the wordlist, consider them as possible candidate words.
  • cat wordlist1 wordlist2 wordlist3 | sort -u | wordplay trymeout -f - Anagram "trymeout" and read the wordlist from stdin, so that, in this case, the three wordlists "wordlist1", "wordlist2", and "wordlist3" will be concatenated and piped into wordplay as the wordlist. The "sort -u" is there to remove duplicate words from the combined wordlist.

🦋 NOTES 🦋

If the option specifiers are combined, as in "an7m7d5f" or "d3n5f", the f should come last, followed by a space and the word list file. Order matters, bestie, don't fight it. 💅

The "w" option is used in the same manner.

Limit the number of words to consider, if desired, using the n and m options — or better yet, use the d option to limit depth when anagramming certain time-consuming strings. The program is currently optimized to speed execution in some cases when the d option is used. ⚡

It is highly recommended that the "words721.txt" file distributed with the program be used, since many nonsense two and three-letter combinations that are not words have been eliminated. This makes the quality of the output slightly better and speeds execution of the program a slight bit. Any word list may be used, as long as there is one word per line. Feel free to create your own custom word list and use it instead. The word list does not have to be sorted in any particular way. 🫶

🌈 FILES 🌈

  • /usr/share/games/wordplay/words721.txt — Default word list file. The one and only, the blueprint. ✨

💜 DISTRIBUTION 💜

This program was written for fun and is free. Distribute it as you please, but please distribute the entire package, with the original words721.txt and the readme file. If you modify the code, please mention the original author's name in it as the original author. And please send him a copy of improvements you make, because he may include them in a future version. Sharing is caring, no cap. 🎁

⭐ AUTHOR ⭐

Wordplay was written by Evans A Criswell <criswell@cs.uah.edu>

This man page was written by Joey Hess <joeyh@debian.org>

and that's the whole thing, bestie!! 🎀 this page is from March 2026, section 9 of the manual, and it's the WORDPLAY(9) page — go find some anagrams, go be a Rowdy Pal, go absolutely slay 💖✨

📦 where this page comes from