Wiktionary talk:Anagrams

Misspellings
I'm going to assume that misspellings are disallowed. --AZard 16:43, 12 November 2008 (UTC)
 * Yes, or at least I hope so. Conrad.Irwin 17:15, 12 November 2008 (UTC)

Beer parlour - significant discussions

 * November 2008: Creation of alphagram template and position of alphagrams. --AZard 17:00, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

and capitalised words which are not substantives
What does that mean, then? A proper noun is a substantive right? Mglovesfun (talk) 15:19, 29 August 2009 (UTC)

Why?
What in the world is the point of cluttering up pages with anagrams? Why would anyone looking up the meaning of a word want to know what the word looks like rearranged into alphabetical order? If there's some useful reason to have the alphagram, can't they just figure it out on their own?


 * Someone looking for the meaning of the word might not care, but a person looking for anagrams would. Did you know that there are published anagram dictionaries?  and that they are organized by alphagram? --EncycloPetey 00:37, 13 December 2009 (UTC)


 * They are important in word games, and people tend to enjoy trivia along the lines of "which word has the most anagrams?". I don't feel that they're vital but I think they're nice to have. Perhaps in future we'll have a more customizable layout such that you could hide sections you don't care about. Equinox ◑ 00:40, 13 December 2009 (UTC)

Perhaps in the future there will be one central place to edit the full list of anagrams of a set of letters. Or maybe Wikipedia will get better interwiki link handling first. But here we don't need a software fix; we simply need to use new templates such as. Since we already have a bot working on anagrams, why not use this method? --NE2 05:37, 24 April 2010 (UTC)


 * I think this is a good starting point. To be honest, I would go all the way and just use, which renders as a link to a separate, special, fully auto-generated page, that collects all acronyms for that alphagram. As a nice touch,  would simply render as "No known anagrams" if the corresponding anagrams page only contains that word. 124.147.76.165 02:23, 3 November 2011 (UTC)


 * Uhm... I thought could automatically work out the alphagram using , but apparently templates are not good for even basic string manupulation. OK then, let's start from  . I'll have a look at bots. Does anyone have any details about the current anagram bot? 124.147.76.165 04:35, 3 November 2011 (UTC)

Anagrams are pointless and should be removed. Palosirkka (talk) 09:34, 19 April 2012 (UTC)

Why again?
I was kindly pointed to this page by an editor answering my question at the Beer Parlour. I also happen to think that anagrams are a confusing waste of space.

Another point I was making is that if we really must live with this largely useless and overly prominent feature, it should be fully automated. Either anagrams are always "generated by a bot", or "users are free to add anagrams", and "You may include the alphagram" (yay, another useless automatable statistics to pollute the page!). What bot does this and how, and why would we allow manual intervention at all, if we trust what it's doing? Thanks. 124.147.76.165 23:45, 2 November 2011 (UTC)

Anagrams Bot
OK, apparently the bot is User:Conrad.Bot. If this is confirmed, it should really be linked in this project page. I'll contact the author and look for the actual bot's code, so I can have a better technical understanding about what can and cannot be done. 124.147.76.165 04:55, 3 November 2011 (UTC)
 * I cannot find the source code. 124.147.76.165 08:32, 3 November 2011 (UTC)
 * The code is (now) at http://jelzo.com/stuff/anagrams.tar.gz, feel free to peruse. The approach taken is a multi-pass one, and you'll need a wiktionary dump and the corresponding definition list (from http://toolserver.org/~enwikt/definitions/) file. The passes are, vaguely:
 * Work out what anagrams should be present by looking at the definitions lists (find_expected.py)
 * Work out which anagrams are already present, by looking at the dump (find_existing.py)
 * Work out the delta (merge.py)
 * Upload the changes (upload.py)
 * It was supposed to have some clever stuff to ensure that if someone deleted an anagram from a page, it didn't re-add it; but I don't think that ever actually worked. Conrad.Irwin 22:02, 10 November 2011 (UTC)

There's no need for this work...
There's no need to place anagrams inside the articles... it would be more practical and discrete to link this tool which is currently used in various Wiktionaries... One should just ask the developer to translate the interface into English, and place a link in the left column... that's all --151.75.10.0 15:36, 17 December 2011 (UTC)
 * The tool you link does not seem to be that much of a help for Dutch. It says geit doesn't have any anagrams, so it forgets (inflected) words like giet. --Ooswesthoesbes (talk) 08:24, 13 March 2012 (UTC)

What is anagrams?

All of humanity is embarrassed by this
Can we remove the anagrams, please? Wiktionary is already the best dictionary, let's make it a serious one. 108.254.247.159 20:56, 22 June 2014 (UTC)


 * Had this discussion a few times before. They are actually useful (mainly for players of word games) though I wouldn't mind hiding them in some kind of collapsible box, since most users won't care; and they are an objective "function" of the word, unlike, say, trivia sections. Equinox ◑ 21:00, 22 June 2014 (UTC)

Please remove anagrams
These serve no purpose and clutter up entries with useless lists. This is not what dictionaries are for. This is the sort of thing that should be done mechanically by sites like http://wordsmith.org/anagram/ from lists like https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Index:English 96.224.65.160 23:32, 3 September 2015 (UTC)


 * This discussion comes up often. They do have a purpose. Didn't you even read this page before posting? Equinox ◑ 23:33, 3 September 2015 (UTC)


 * What should 96.224.65.160 have read here, which might have addressed his totally valid points? Do you think that he doesn't know that anagrams are useful to players of word games? 2602:30A:2E9C:80B0:0:0:0:3E8 05:17, 20 December 2015 (UTC)


 * Maybe something could be hosted on Toolserver (or whatever its successor is as it seems to have been shut down) and linked to on the Wiktionary main page. —suzukaze (t・c) 05:34, 20 December 2015 (UTC)

Just ignore them
If you don't want to read anagram sections then don't read the anagram sections. They don't take up much physical space and thus don't create clutter (and there's no policy regarding Clutter). Nothing gets thrown away to make room for the anagram sections, unlike books in a public library with limited space. Hyacinth (talk) 06:02, 25 December 2018 (UTC)
 * It seems that this argument could be used to justify including almost anything, as long as it was small enough. Khromegnome (talk) 05:08, 7 May 2021 (UTC)

Noise added to Special:WhatLinksHere and search
I am on the side of removing anagrams, as I think they are a net detriment to the project. Today I encountered an issue that I don't think has been remarked on yet. I was contemplating making a category for litotes. To get a sense of how many expressions we had labelled as litotes I checked inbound links to the litotes entry at Special:WhatLinksHere/litotes (and filtered to the main namespace). Wait, how is toilets used litotically?, I wondered. Oh, right, it's just an anagram... This also comes up all the time when searching. It adds a bit of noise that stymies these sorts of search tasks. Not a lot of noise, granted, but what we're weighing it against is not a lot of benefit. When people say that anagrams don't have any downside, and those who don't like them can just ignore them, I think they're missing this aspect. Colin M (talk) 21:05, 26 March 2021 (UTC)


 * You were misusing the feature. WhatLinksHere gives you a list of all pages that link to another page (for any reason). If you look up words that link to "metaphor" then you naturally aren't only going to find words that are metaphors. What you want for your litotes is a category. Equinox ◑ 20:35, 2 May 2021 (UTC)
 * My whole goal was to create a category. I was using WhatLinksHere to find candidate entries to populate such a category. I understand that WhatLinksHere is not going to be a perfect tool for this, but my point is that anagrams make it worse, insofar as they make the "X links to Y" relation less correlated with X being semantically related to Y. Colin M (talk) 01:52, 3 May 2021 (UTC)

Keeping anagrams on the basis of word games isn't a strong argument
It's implied above that a good motivation to display all anagrams, for every word, is that they are useful for word games. I argue that this isn't a good motivating principle. As also mentioned above, these lists can be (and are) generated automatically, given a complete list of words which are acceptable, so it's possible to have a link which says "get all anagrams", without having to store the list on the pages and maintain them with a bot. I'd like to add that there are many other automatically-generatable lists which would be equally useful to players of word games and there's nothing to privilege a list of anagrams. For example, take Scrabble, a very popular word game. Anagrams are useful (somewhat), but so would be


 * a list of all words formed by adding a letter to the beginning or end of this word,
 * a list of all words containing this word (in order or not), or
 * a list of all words contained in this word (in order or not).

There would be other examples for other popular games (say, a list of words which involve adding, or deleting, or moving one character from the current word - that would be useful for games like Ghost or for making word ladders). It's very cool to have tools that leverage Wiktionary's database for the purpose of generating lists for games. However, I argue that it would be excessive to write them all out on the pages, and singling out the anagram list seems arbitrary. Khromegnome (talk) 17:40, 2 May 2021 (UTC)

Relevant Beer Parlour Discussions
Khromegnome (talk) 09:56, 15 September 2021 (UTC)
 * November 2011 Discussion: "Anagrams"
 * February 2015 discussion: "Anagrams - do they serve a purpose?"
 * May 2021 Discussion: "Why do we include rhymes?"
 * July 2021 Discussion: "Anagrams"
 * September 2021 Discussion: "Does anyone strongly support keeping anagrams?"


 * Beer_parlour
 * Besenj (talk) 15:54, 16 July 2023 (UTC)
 * I took the liberty of unbreaking your May 2021 link. --RichardW57m (talk) 17:16, 1 August 2023 (UTC)

Vietnamese
As I've been adding anagrams in Vietnamese, I've been splitting apart digraphs and trigraphs because otherwise there are very few anagrams, but I've been omitting anagrams that require changing diacritical marks, because that would create an inordinate number of anagrams that aren't very useful in Vietnamese. I don't think there's very much awareness of anagrams as a concept in Vietnamese, but people do use them in word play, if not to the extent of word play involving tones. I'm also including anagrams made by switching syllables around. A lot of compound words can be reversed without changing meaning, but a lot of them change meaning very subtly when reversed , and some very unsubtly. This can be a minefield for non-native speakers. In my opinion, if we're going to maintain hatnotes and appendices about diacritic folding, then anagrams are just another kind of collation-related did-you-know that can be included in entries. Minh Nguyễn &#x1f4ac; 21:38, 24 July 2022 (UTC)


 * I'm confused by what you said about tones. If composing a list of anagrams for Vietnamese, what should one do with tone?
 * Ignore it?
 * Require that it go somewhere in the anagram?
 * Require it to stay with the vowel?
 * Please advise. --RichardW57m (talk) 17:04, 1 August 2023 (UTC)