I'm going to assume that misspellings are disallowed. --AZard 16:43, 12 November 2008 (UTC)
What does that mean, then? A proper noun is a substantive right? Mglovesfun (talk) 15:19, 29 August 2009 (UTC)
What in the world is the point of cluttering up pages with anagrams? Why would anyone looking up the meaning of a word want to know what the word looks like rearranged into alphabetical order? If there's some useful reason to have the alphagram, can't they just figure it out on their own? — This unsigned comment was added by 71.167.63.79 (talk).
Perhaps in the future there will be one central place to edit the full list of anagrams of a set of letters. Or maybe Wikipedia will get better interwiki link handling first. But here we don't need a software fix; we simply need to use new templates such as {{anagrams:aaagmnrs}}. Since we already have a bot working on anagrams, why not use this method? --NE2 05:37, 24 April 2010 (UTC)
Anagrams are pointless and should be removed. Palosirkka (talk) 09:34, 19 April 2012 (UTC)
I was kindly pointed to this page by an editor answering my question at the Beer Parlour. I also happen to think that anagrams are a confusing waste of space.
Another point I was making is that if we really must live with this largely useless and overly prominent feature, it should be fully automated. Either anagrams are always "generated by a bot", or "users are free to add anagrams", and "You may include the alphagram" (yay, another useless automatable statistics to pollute the page!). What bot does this and how, and why would we allow manual intervention at all, if we trust what it's doing? Thanks. 124.147.76.165 23:45, 2 November 2011 (UTC)
OK, apparently the bot is User:Conrad.Bot. If this is confirmed, it should really be linked in this project page. I'll contact the author and look for the actual bot's code, so I can have a better technical understanding about what can and cannot be done. 124.147.76.165 04:55, 3 November 2011 (UTC)
There's no need to place anagrams inside the articles... it would be more practical and discrete to link this tool which is currently used in various Wiktionaries... One should just ask the developer to translate the interface into English, and place a link in the left column... that's all --151.75.10.0 15:36, 17 December 2011 (UTC)
What is anagrams?
Can we remove the anagrams, please? Wiktionary is already the best dictionary, let's make it a serious one. 108.254.247.159 20:56, 22 June 2014 (UTC)
These serve no purpose and clutter up entries with useless lists. This is not what dictionaries are for. This is the sort of thing that should be done mechanically by sites like http://wordsmith.org/anagram/ from lists like https://en.wiktionary.orghttps://dictious.com/en/Index:English 96.224.65.160 23:32, 3 September 2015 (UTC)
If you don't want to read anagram sections then don't read the anagram sections. They don't take up much physical space and thus don't create clutter (and there's no policy regarding Wiktionary:Clutter). Nothing gets thrown away to make room for the anagram sections, unlike books in a public library with limited space. Hyacinth (talk) 06:02, 25 December 2018 (UTC)
I am on the side of removing anagrams, as I think they are a net detriment to the project. Today I encountered an issue that I don't think has been remarked on yet. I was contemplating making a category for litotes. To get a sense of how many expressions we had labelled as litotes I checked inbound links to the litotes entry at Special:WhatLinksHere/litotes (and filtered to the main namespace). Wait, how is toilets used litotically?, I wondered. Oh, right, it's just an anagram... This also comes up all the time when searching. It adds a bit of noise that stymies these sorts of search tasks. Not a lot of noise, granted, but what we're weighing it against is not a lot of benefit. When people say that anagrams don't have any downside, and those who don't like them can just ignore them, I think they're missing this aspect. Colin M (talk) 21:05, 26 March 2021 (UTC)
It's implied above that a good motivation to display all anagrams, for every word, is that they are useful for word games. I argue that this isn't a good motivating principle. As also mentioned above, these lists can be (and are) generated automatically, given a complete list of words which are acceptable, so it's possible to have a link which says "get all anagrams", without having to store the list on the pages and maintain them with a bot. I'd like to add that there are many other automatically-generatable lists which would be equally useful to players of word games and there's nothing to privilege a list of anagrams. For example, take Scrabble, a very popular word game. Anagrams are useful (somewhat), but so would be
There would be other examples for other popular games (say, a list of words which involve adding, or deleting, or moving one character from the current word - that would be useful for games like Ghost or for making word ladders). It's very cool to have tools that leverage Wiktionary's database for the purpose of generating lists for games. However, I argue that it would be excessive to write them all out on the pages, and singling out the anagram list seems arbitrary. Khromegnome (talk) 17:40, 2 May 2021 (UTC)
Khromegnome (talk) 09:56, 15 September 2021 (UTC)
As I've been adding anagrams in Vietnamese, I've been splitting apart digraphs and trigraphs because otherwise there are very few anagrams, but I've been omitting anagrams that require changing diacritical marks, because that would create an inordinate number of anagrams that aren't very useful in Vietnamese. I don't think there's very much awareness of anagrams as a concept in Vietnamese, but people do use them in word play, if not to the extent of word play involving tones. I'm also including anagrams made by switching syllables around. A lot of compound words can be reversed without changing meaning (viếng thăm, thăm viếng; xã hội chủ nghĩa, chủ nghĩa xã hội), but a lot of them change meaning very subtly when reversed (hình họa, họa hình; liên kết, kết liên), and some very unsubtly (mẹ con, con mẹ; học sinh, sinh học). This can be a minefield for non-native speakers. In my opinion, if we're going to maintain hatnotes and appendices about diacritic folding, then anagrams are just another kind of collation-related did-you-know that can be included in entries. Minh Nguyễn 💬 21:38, 24 July 2022 (UTC)