PLEASE NOTE:  Anagrams doesn't run on Mac OS 10.7 or later. I've created a new app called Ag that can do most of the things Anagrams could do, but Ag is free, open source and cross-platform. More details, including screenshots and download links, are available at Ag's web site: http://ag1.sourceforge.net/.

Anagrams is a fast and friendly anagram generator for the Mac. It is also a handy companion for Scrabble and crossword fans. The main design goal was to make it fun and easy to find interesting anagrams for any given text. See the Hall of Fame for lots of good examples.

The following screen dump shows the result of entering some text (Albert Einstein), clicking on "Find Usable Words", selecting the words IS and ART, then clicking on "Find Anagrams" to generate all anagrams starting with those words:

Anagrams has many useful features:

• Various options can restrict the search for usable words and anagrams. For example, you can specify that usable words must have between 3 and 6 letters and any anagrams must have from 2 to 4 words.

• While anagrams are being generated you can scroll up and down the list and copy any interesting ones to the Clipboard (for pasting into your text editor). You can also drag anagrams straight into any drag-savvy editor.

• The supplied word lists can be modified. The Edit window lets you find, add or delete words. Grep-like patterns can be used to select one or more words; the following example shows how to find all words without any vowels:

• You can also ask Anagrams to read a given text file and automatically add any new words found; this is very handy for creating a new word list from scratch.

• Word lists contain user-definable characters. The default character set includes accented letters and other 8-bit characters used in most languages based on the Roman script.

• Save your favorite names and phrases in a "hot text" menu for later recall.

• You can build a tree of selected usable words where all paths in the tree are prefixes for potential anagrams. This can be quite useful when finding anagrams for long phrases. Trees can be filed away for later recall.

• Detailed help is provided in the Help menu.

Send all your bug reports, queries and suggestions to andrew@trevorrow.com.

Additional word lists can be downloaded:

The non-English lists contain accented letters and other 8-bit characters.

Anagrams is a Carbonized app that runs fine on OS X. It also runs on OS 8.6/9.x if CarbonLib 1.3 or later is installed.

To download the latest version of Anagrams (2.4), click here.