How the fun phrases generator works

This one is deliberately loose. Instead of demanding an exact anagram, it takes some or all of the letters in each word you typed and looks for a combination that reads like a phrase.

1. 1

   Each word becomes a slot

   Your input is split on punctuation and spaces, and every word becomes one slot in the finished phrase. The number of words you type is the number of words you get back, in the same order.

2. 2

   Every slot gets a pool of candidates

   For each word we find real words that can be spelled from some — or all — of that word's letters. A seven-letter word might contribute a three-letter or a six-letter answer, which is what keeps the results surprising.

3. 3

   One-letter words stay themselves

   “a” and “I” are kept literally and hold their slot, so a phrase like “able was a dragon” still generates instead of stalling.

4. 4

   Patterns shape the picks

   Rather than combining at random, we favour shapes that sound like language — noun·verb·noun, adjective·noun·verb, adverb·verb·noun — using the word-type data behind the site. That is why the output reads as funny rather than as noise.

5. 5

   Five at a time, up to twenty-five

   Exhaustive generation would be enormous, so we hand you five phrases per round. “Create 5 more” runs another round, skips anything already shown, and is capped at four extra batches — twenty-five phrases in total per input.

Open the Fun Phrases Generator →