How Likely Are Duplicate Anagrams

Authors

A. Ross Eckler

Abstract

If different people attempt to form anagrams of the same phrase, how likely are they to come up with the same one? (By "same" I mean the same set of words, perhaps arranged in a different order.) Some light is shed on this question by a corpus of several thousand anagrams constructed in 1993 by Games magazine readers in the "Mixed Reviews" contest (for examples, see the Word Ways issues of November 1994, February 1995 and May 1995). Certain movie titles were anagrammed by as many as 30 different contestants.

Recommended Citation

Eckler, A. Ross (1997) "How Likely Are Duplicate Anagrams," Word Ways: Vol. 30 : Iss. 2 , Article 15.
Retrieved from: https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/wordways/vol30/iss2/15