Generate Anagrams

Generates unique anagrams of a given word, with support for limits and dictionary filtering.

generateAnagrams

The generateAnagrams function generates unique anagrams of a given word. It returns an array of lowercase anagrams, with the original word (lowercased) as the first element.

Function Signature

function generateAnagrams(word: string, options?: AnagramOptions): Lowercase<string>[]

Parameters

word (string): The word to generate anagrams for.
options (AnagramOptions, optional): Configuration options:
- limit (number | 'all'): Maximum number of anagrams to generate. Defaults to 100.
- dictionary (string[] | false): If provided, only anagrams present in this list are returned (case-insensitive). Defaults to false.

Types

`AnagramOptions`

interface AnagramOptions {
  limit?: number | 'all';
  dictionary?: false | string[];
}

Return Value

Lowercase<string>[]: An array of unique, lowercase anagrams. The original word (lowercased) is always the first element.

Example Usage

playground.ts

Limitations

Dictionary-based filtering only includes exact matches; partial matches are ignored.
For built-in dictionary-based anagrams, use the dedicated package nhb-anagram-generator, which specifically returns valid words (optional all words) using a built-in json dictionary.

Notes

Single character words return a single-item array containing the lowercase character.
An empty string returns an empty array.

For a pre-built dictionary of English words, you can fetch english-words.json and pass its array format to options.dictionary.

import dict from './english-words.json'; // match your path

const words = (dict as { words: string[] }).words; // it contains 370,100 English words
generateAnagrams('banana', { dictionary: words });

Anagram generation scales factorially with word length; use limit when dealing with longer words to avoid freezing the execution thread.

On this page