Longest anagram

I’ve been trying to think of a word of greater than four letters that make a single word anagram of identical length. Four is the most I can think of. Anyone have hany ideas?

Try googling ‘longest anagram’. http://www.asdf.org/~anna/grams/12to17.html

Here are a few that are not listed in the above website (it seems they don’t include anagrams that repeat strings of more than three letters):
petrographically = pterylographical (16)
nonconservational = nonconversational (17)
incontrovertibility = introconvertibility (19)
impressivenesses = permissivenesses (16)

There are also a few that follow the form whatever-ism = mis-whatever:
configurationism = misconfiguration (16)
constitutionalism = misconstitutional (17)
representationism = misrepresentation (17)

Here are some larger sets of anagrams:
gramophonically = monographically = nomographically (15)
peridiastolic = periodicalist = pictorialised = proidealistic (13)
espringal = graplines = pearlings = presignal = relapsing = spanglier (9)
arsenites = atrienses = irateness = resinates = stearines = teariness (9)

All of the above words are found in the Linux words file. I’d be interested to see if anyone can guess the simple algorithm I used to generate these.

I was gonna give you a couple of six-letter words (how lame of me!):

Nicest/incest

Smiled/misled

How could an anagram be anything other than identical length? :confused:

In anagramming, 14, for example, doesn’t equal 5+3+6, because one long word is not three short words.

Well, a simple algorithm would be to store all the words in a hash and then go through each trying all the combinations and checking if those exist in the hash. …which sounds a bit time consuming.

A real, and still relatively simply method, would be to store a letter count as a string and use that as a key into a hash which contained in each slot a list of the words which hashed to it.

So for instance, dog might go to:

0-0-1-0-0-1-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-1-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0 (i.e. one ‘d’, one ‘g’, and one ‘o’)

Which will of course also be the key created by ‘god’

From there, it’s just a matter of sorting the contents of your hash.

I missed the leading zero. Properly that should be 0-0-0-1-0-0-1-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-1-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0

“Interlaminations” and “Internationalism” are a pair of 16-letter instances.

I’m wondering if there’s something intended by the OP that we’re all missing. I say this only because it’s hard to believe someone would be unable to find five-letter words that form anagram pairs. I don’t mean any disrespect to dauerbach, but you don’t have to be a genius word puzzle geek to notice things like table / bleat, steam / mates, crate / trace and so on. There are lots of very common five-letter words that are anagrams of others. Even six- and seven-letter anagram pairs are not hard to find.

letters -> settler -> trestle
ideas -> aides -> aside

Those appear to be the only two from your post that will anagram out (well besides “single” which goes to “engles” which isn’t a word I know.)

That’s pretty close to what I did, except I used a somewhat simpler hash function: simply write the letters of the word in alphabetical order. I now have a wordlist file with 2 columns: first is the “hash,” and column 2 has the actual word. The rows are sorted alphabetically by column 1. Then all I have to do is search for duplicate hashes, filtering out words that are below a threshold length.

Coincidentally, the 2-column word list is also handy for solving the Jumble in the daily paper: Just look up the letters, and the unscrambled word is right there next to it. If you printed the list out, you could even unscramble words without a computer.