An anagram is a word or phrase that made by rearranging the letters from another word or phrase. For this thread, I’m only interested in those of words (not phrases) and only when there’s the minimal change between them. By minimal, I mean that the only change is swapping two adjacent letters. Examples:
incest nicest
marital martial
rogue rouge
There’s tons more of them, even if you ignore short words.
What’s the longest minimal anagram pair? For this question, factor out any common prefixes and suffixes.
Much rarer is a set of three or more minimal anagrams. Restricting word size to those of 5 or more letters, I only know of two sets of three:
I found this site that has a list of letters that form large sets of words in the ENABLE word list. From that, I found these of varying quality:
stale steal stela (stone pillar)
pries piers peris (Persian winged spirits)
beast beats betas (to my surprise, besat isn’t in ENABLE)
coast coats costa (not really English, IMHO)
While looking for more of those, I found treatise treaties, which may or may not work for you.
My eyes are starting to glaze over, so I’m going to go ahead and post what I’ve found so far before the board takes a nap. I’ll keep looking into this and will report if I find anything worthwhile.
I realised after seeing Kimble’s post that I didn’t describe what I meant by a set of three. What I really meant was a set where the first two words form a minimal anagram and then the second and third form another minimal anagram. If there’s a fourth word, it forms one with number 3. and so forth. Although there could also be a branch where a word forms one with a word in the middle of the set. I can see where I gave the wrong impression about this because I underlined all three letters in all the words of the sets.
They should have been more like this:
thickset thickest thickets
So that would make the other list, which now has four words, looks like this:
besat beast bea**ts** betas
[Whew! Getting all those tags correct was challenging. Let’s skip them for the rest of this thread.]
There is a problem with that set, though. The last two have a common suffix that should be factored out. But that makes them not be anagrams of the other two. Well, ignore that for now. Only factor out suffixes from all words in the set.
I wrote a program to look for minimal anagrams. It found 1410 examples. The longest pair it found is the rather unsatisfying “imperscriptible imprescriptible”. Other long ones that seem interesting to me:
A lot of the actual minimal pairs in markn+'s list are much shorter than as presented, as they use the same prefixes/suffixes to achieve their length. The first one of the proper list is even lamer than the two law terms he found unsatisfying, as they mean the same thing and the difference is only how to form the adjectival form of “Paradise”. The second I guess is pretty decent as I don’t think you can shorten petroglyph or pteroglyph to just the prefixes and get actual words, even though what are really minimal pairs are the prefixes, which means their length is rather suspect in origin. I think the “best” ones are octillion and cotillion, as the rest of the words are completely unrelated. Complaint and compliant are pretty good too.
Also this made me think there are some words that truly are anagrams of themselves, in the sense that the letters of the word can be reanalyzed into different affixes. The one example I think of the most of unionized (In a union, or not ionized).
I was going to make a post saying basically what glowacks said, so I’ll just say “exactly”. Note that the OP did say to factor out common affixes.
As for pterograph (not pteroglyph), that word isn’t in M-W online dictionary. Maybe it’s in some other dictionary, but going just by M-W, we can only shorten that set to petrographic/pterographic. Similarly, egocentric/geocentric also can’t be shortened, even though they have the same -centric suffix. ‘Ego’ is a word, but ‘geo-’ is a combinative form, not a word by itself.