In the first box, type some jumbled-up letters. You can use the .
character as a wildcard
if you like.
For example, putting cat
in the box will give you the anagrams
act
and cat
(cat
counts as an anagram of
cat
). Putting c.t
will give you all the three-letter
words that contain a c
and a t
. Note that ct.
gives exactly the same result as c.t
.
In the second box, you can also type a series of letters or dots. But
this time they have to be in the right order. For example, c.t
will match words like cot
and cut
, that begin with
c
and end with t
, but won't match words like act
.
In fact you can type any expression understood by the GNU/Linux program
grep, but dots and letters are probably all you need.
This is the sort of thing you'd use if you were solving a crossword
puzzle, and you wanted to find, say, all the possible words that go
l-blank-m-blank-o-blank-blank-blank-r
. Just put dots for blanks,
type l.m.o...r
in the box, and press Search. Try it.
If you only fill in the first box, you will look for anagrams. If you
only fill in the second box, you will match patterns. If you fill in
both boxes, the output of the anagram search will be the
input to the pattern match. In other words, putting
emphasis
in the first box, and m.......
in the second box
will give you all the anagrams of emphasis
that start with
m
.
You are doing a crossword, and you know (from a previous clue you
already solved) that one of the answers begins with an a
. This
is the clue for that answer:
Legal position of confused hypnotist era (12)
Hmm, tricky…. It looks like an anagram. Type hypnotistera
in the top box, and a...........
(or you can just type
a.*
) in the bottom box. The answer is attorneyship
.
grep is a standard UNIX program, and
anag is available here. Working out how
to use the command line will save you using this irritating form.