In the main type of anagram dictionary, the letters in words or phrases are rearranged in alphabetical order, and these transpositions are themselves then ordered alphabetically within word-length groups, so that any words consisting of this group of letters can be found. This arrangement is designed for use in solving

word puzzle Word games (also called word game puzzles or word search games) are spoken, board, or video games often designed to test ability with language or to explore its properties. Word games are generally used as a source of entertainment, but can ad ...

s such as

crossword A crossword is a word puzzle that usually takes the form of a square or a rectangular grid of white- and black-shaded squares. The goal is to fill the white squares with letters, forming words or phrases, by solving clues which lead to the ans ...

s, or for playing games such as ''

Scrabble ''Scrabble'' is a word game in which two to four players score points by placing tiles, each bearing a single letter, onto a game board divided into a 15×15 grid of squares. The tiles must form words that, in crossword fashion, read left t ...

''. The first such anagram dictionary was ''The Crossword Anagram Dictionary'' by R.J. Edwards In the other kind of anagram dictionary, words are categorized into equivalence classes that consist of words with the same number of each kind of letter. Thus words will only appear when other words can be made from the same letters. Anagram dictionaries were formerly produced by hand, but can now be trivially generated from any machine-readable word list by computer, for example, by th
Internet Anagram Server
and thi
Scrabble Word Finder
by sorting words in order of their sorted letter-strings.

References

Dictionaries by type {{dictionary-stub