[newbe]

My example explanation: Let's say I have the letters AEIRST and "?". The question mark could be any letter, sorted anywhere within the arrangement. For that matter, all the "other normal" letters "AEIRST" could be sorted in any arrangement, I...

My example explanation:

Let's say I have the letters AEIRST and "?". The question mark could be any letter, sorted anywhere within the arrangement. For that matter, all the "other normal" letters "AEIRST" could be sorted in any arrangement, I do not care about their positions/order these letters are shuffled in.

What I do want to know, is given these six letters and a wildcard letter whatever it may be (A-Z), how many different seven letter words can be made from this assortment? and what are they?

Is there any easy VBS script that I can run through a command prompt for this? A simple function that when you type in a certain set of six or seven letters it searches for every word that contains those letters?
Maybe there is a way to do it in excel without a programming solution? If so, I cannot find it. Suggestions?

For example, adding an "S" as a wildcard to the arrangement above gives you the word satires, a "W" = wariest, a "G" gives you triages, aigrets, etc and so on. So as you can see with this last example, I do not care about the position of the mystery letter either, upon its output. In the case of the "G" it happens to be in the 5th position for triages and 3rd position for aigrets, etc. I also don't care about the position of the given letters AEIRST upon their output as part of a single word.

I already have downloaded the entire dictionary of words and have four columns:

Column A = word length, which is simply a number signifying the number of total letters in that word. The word satires, would have a "7" in this row.

Column B = number of anagrams. Given the length of the word, how many other words of that same length that can be made out of the same given letters. For example, the letters OTSP, have a word length in column A of 4, and an anagram number of "6" in column B.

because it can make six words and they are:

OPTS
POTS
POST
TOPS
SPOT
STOP

Column C = the actual dictionary word itself, written out in full.

Column D = the alphagram of that word. An alphagram is equal to taking the dictionary word and sorting the letters in ascending alphabetical order. Using the example above, whenever the six dicitionary words are encountered in column C, they all have the same "alphagram" = OPST

I hope this is clear, because it does not seem to me that the casual CONTROL + F feature in conjunction with the "*" wildcard character does this method of sort any justice.

I could even send an example spreadsheet with the data I created if it would help.


Eric Lutz