THE BIG 80 : All About Anagrams

Honestly, I'm not a big fan of word games. So I had no idea when I read it first. But I wanted to find out what these "Anagrams" do. Then I found it interesting, a puzzle that was hidden inside a word. I feel I will never look at a word again as before. I'm trying to see a different pattern in every word now. 😵‍💫

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• What are Anagrams?

If you put it very simply, it is rearranging the letters. As to the above example, you can see that the word CAT has three letters. So, there are 06 possibilities when you rearrange it.

CAT	CTA	ACT
ATC	TCA	TAC

See now the CAT & ACT are the recognized words here. So the result of rearranging must be a valid word or phrase, and it must be different from the original word or phrase.

Now 03 letters can crack like a charm with only 06 possibilities. This is because there are 3 options for the first letter, 2 options for the second letter (since one of the letters has already been used), and 1 option for the third letter. This can be calculated by multiplying the number of options for each letter: 3 x 2 x 1 = 6

Guess a word like "Dormitory" which has 09 letters. Do you know how many possibilities there are?

Get the calculators ready! 9 x 8 x 7 x 6 x 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1 = 362,880

362,880 possible arrangements Good luck with cracking them in this lifetime.

• How to solve Anagrams

There are a few different techniques,

1. Break the word down into smaller chunks and rearrange those chunks to form the new word.
2. Look for common letter combinations, such as "th" or "ing", and try rearranging those letters to see if they form a word.
3. Look up the letters in a dictionary and see if any of the resulting words could be anagrams.

These techniques could help you to identify potential words that could be formed from the letters rather than staring at a word for hours. Believe me I just had that experience 😁

• Good Anagram solving sites

Well, Google gives you plenty of choices to choose from. Most of them were good to solve 3 to 5 letter anagrams. However, the result was not so friendly with the harder ones.

For example, https://anagram-solver.net/ gave me many options for my "Dormitory" example.

^{Screenshot of anagram-solver.net}

You can see the scroll bar on the right side of the screenshot and imagine how many words it presented. However, the answer "Dirty Room" was not there. Still, you can get a lot of clues out of it and it is much better than going with 362,880 possibilities.

What3words is the next challenge and I'm glad it is much more familiar than this one.

I hope you enjoyed my contest entry and learned something out of it.