optimal 4 letters for anagrams, abbrs, and slang

April 28, 2007 9:43 PM

How to determine which four letters will give the most anagrams, abbrs, slang, and internet/bb/txt slang/abbrs?

No 733t, letters only. After determining the 4 letters a list of results would be needed.

posted by sailormouth to writing & language (9 comments total)

The quickest way I could think of doing it is to write a script to count search engine results for the 456,976 possible combinations. Because there's no canonical dictionary for "anagrams, abbrs, slang, and internet/bb/txt slang/abbrs" and the only other way is to analyze a corpus.

(If you try it BTW, Google will turn off access from your IP about 1% in...)
posted by neustile at 9:55 PM on April 28, 2007

If you try it BTW, Google will turn off access from your IP about 1% in...

Unless you do it through Tor so your IP keeps changing.
posted by contraption at 10:24 PM on April 28, 2007

Do you want a single four-letter word that has lots of anagrams AND is an abbreviation for lots of things? Or do you want the most anagrammable word, the most abbreviating word, etc.? I can understand why you'd lump slang and abbreviations together, but the anagram requirement seems a little out of place. Maybe you meant acrostic?

Abbreviations.com is a great place to look for abbreviations. I'm not sure if they anywhere list the letter sequences that have a lot of entries. But by entering sequences that seem promising, I found that STAR has 62 entries. (And it's very anagrammable!)
posted by painquale at 10:58 PM on April 28, 2007

Unless you do it through Tor so your IP keeps changing.

Won't work. Most Tor nodes that handle outbound HTTP traffic have been blocked by Google anyway, even under normal usage (you get a page that requires you to fill out a CAPTCHA). Every once in a while you run across a node that hasn't been blocked, but it's less than 50% of the time in my experience of experimenting with it.

Plus, it takes several seconds to establish a new pathway through the Tor system, in order to get a new IP address; even if you somehow didn't encounter any endpoints that required a CAPTCHA, it would still take a very long time.

Plus, using Tor in order to be abusive is very uncool -- and running thousands of scripted requests into a search engine is definitely abusive.
posted by Kadin2048 at 11:04 PM on April 28, 2007

I'm looking for four letters that can be more than just a regular anagram like 1234 to 2431 to 1423. They could also go 2241 and 4241 or 3312. Beyond that somewhat recognizable abbreviations and slang would be useful. Extremely specialized abbrs would be as useful as gibberish which would not be useful.
posted by sailormouth at 11:16 PM on April 28, 2007

I'd find/download a usenet archive & run your search on that. A lot of old groups have archives through the 90s available, usually in mbox, which isn't a bad format to deal with.
posted by devilsbrigade at 11:16 PM on April 28, 2007

If you're handy with writing code, I'd recommend seeing if the folks who created the internet anagram server might be kind enough to give you their code. Then you could feed in all of the possible combinations of 4 letters and see what yields the most results. I'm not sure if their dictionary contains common abbreviations/slang, but you might be able to add to it.

Alternatively, the guy who created it might just be of some help answering your question directly, seeing as it's clearly subject matter that interests him.

While the google / usenet search ideas are creative, I don't think they'll get you accurate results. You'll come up with misspellings and all sorts of other non-words that corrupt your numbers.
posted by twiggy at 12:53 AM on April 29, 2007

I'm not sure I understand the question. Are you asking,"which four letters can arranged to mean the most things?"
posted by magikker at 1:25 AM on April 29, 2007

UPDATE
So I used some perl and php to get an answer.
I generated the 456976 possible combinations and ran those against ispell (technically aspell 0.50.5 alpha) which yielded 2729 words and/or abbr. those I then filtered down to unique letters (no letter was used more than once) and sorted by remaining length. Then sort by frequency and arrived at aest with a total of 20 word/abbrs.

asst
ates
ease
east
eats
etas
sass
sate
seas
seat
sees
sets
sett
stat
stet
tats
teas
teat
tees
test
posted by sailormouth at 8:16 AM on May 31, 2007