Wordplay Anagram Program

Written by Evans A Criswell

Version 7.22 (1996/03/20)

Originally created 1991/03/29 (Version 1.00)


This is a program written in ANSI C that anagrams a given string. It has its own word file, but allows you to use a different one. There are versions available for UNIX, DOS, and OS/2. The DOS and OS/2 packages contain a precompiled executable. The UNIX version must be compiled with an ANSI C compiler.

The most recent version of Wordplay at this time is 7.22 (1996/03/20), for UNIX, and version 7.20 for DOS and OS/2 (1994/08/21). Version 7.22 contains a fix for a small memory allocation bug that has bitten at least two people, although it has never bitten me. :-)

Wordplay is available via this WWW page and by anonymous ftp from marvin.itsc.uah.edu, directory pub/wordplay.

UNIX version: wordplay722.tar.Z
DOS version (for 386sx or better): wp722dos.zip
OS/2 version (for IBM OS/2 2.0 or later): wp720os2.zip

I don't have very good access to OS/2 anymore, and that is why I haven't updated that version in a while.

The source should compile and run fine on any ANSI C implementation with integers that are at least 32-bit and without brain-dead memory limitations (such as 64K segments). The DOS/Windows command-line version was compiled with Microsoft Visual C++ 4.0.

I originally wrote the first version (1.00) of this program on 1991/03/29 in FORTRAN (Microsoft 5.0 for OS/2, to be exact). It could only do two-word anagrams using a brute-force approach. It has come a long way since then. It was eventually converted to C on 1993/04/30 (Version 4.00). The recursive approach that was not limited to a specific number of words per anagram appeared in version 5.00 on 1993/11/08.


View the Wordplay Version 7.22 readme file

Contains notes concerning program usage and development history.


View the Wordplay Version 7.22 C source code

NOTE: If you are interested in Wordplay, please get the entire package that includes the default word list, instead of saving this source code and compiling it without getting one of the distributions. See above for the anonymous ftp information.


Related information

There is a great Windows based program called "Anagram Genius" written by William Tunstall-Pedoe. It, instead of a brute force method considering all words equally, uses a more intelligent anagram engine that greatly increases the quality of the output. There is now a WWW page for Anagram Genius.
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Evans A Criswell (criswell@itsc.uah.edu)