Having trouble figuring this out

Two words are anagrams if you can rearrange the letters of one to spell the second. For example, the following words are anagrams:

abets, baste, bates, beast, beats, betas

Pay attention to the letter count: hash and sash use the same three letters, but they are not anagrams.

1) At this point, I have a couple algorithms to tell if two words are anagrams:

def is_anagram(word1, word2): ''' function to decide if two words are anagrams''' if len(word1) != len(word2): return False lst = [ch for ch in word2.lower() if ch in word1.lower()] return len(word1) == len(lst) print(is_anagram('Flap', 'Slap')) print(is_anagram('Abut', 'Tuba'))

def are_anagrams(word1, word2):

word1 = word1.lower() word2 = word2.lower() if len(word1) != len(word2): return False ### else: return word1[::-1] == word2

print(are_anagrams('flap', 'slap')) print(are_anagrams('flap', 'PALF')) print(are_anagrams('baste', 'tabes'))

I want to write a program that will mine the dictionary words.txt for sets of anagrams. I want it to take a command-line argument and be able to search a file. Throws an exception if the file doesn't exist. You might want to practice with the initial parts of words.txt. A 10,000 word list was used and found all but the last word in the list above.

Output: program should print the 10 largest sets of anagrams, such as the set above.

Hint: How can you tell quickly if two words are anagrams?

Hint: How can you avoid another sweep through the dictionary when you try to find anagrams of a new word?

Challenge: Write a program that finds all the anagrams in under 2 seconds. Time to beat is 0.4 seconds on an older laptop.

Hint: Dictionaries allow you to find a key quickly. What key would be most useful?

Hint: Try out your algorithms on a small set of words, such as this 5K list

There are three sets of anagrams of length 3 in this set:

(3, ['anergias', 'angaries', 'arginase'])

(3, ['amain', 'amnia', 'anima'])

(3, ['alien', 'aline', 'anile'])

Here is a file with the first 10K words

5K wordlist link: http://wikisend.com/download/997018/shortWords.txt

10K wordlist link: http://wikisend.com/download/358572/words10K.txt