A blanagram (from blank+anagram) is a word which is an anagram of another but for the substitution of a single letter. The term has its origin in competitive Scrabble, where a blank tile on a player's rack may be used to form any of several possible words in conjunction with the player's other tiles.

Examples of blanagrams

  • On the list of currently acceptable words for club and tournament Scrabble in North America (OWL2), the anagram pair EPICOTYL/LIPOCYTE has 18 blanagrams:
    • Replacing C with L or N yields POLITELY or LINOTYPE;
    • Replacing I with A or F yields CALOTYPE or COPYLEFT;
    • Replacing L with C or D yields ECOTYPIC or COPYEDIT;
    • Replacing O with H or I yields PHYLETIC or PYELITIC;
    • Replacing P with R or V yields CRYOLITE or VELOCITY;
    • Replacing T with N yields POLYENIC;
    • Replacing Y with A, H, N, R, or U yields POETICAL, CHIPOTLE/HELICOPT, LEPTONIC, LEPROTIC/PETROLIC, or POULTICE.
Note that in this case no blanagram is available by replacing the E, so EPICOTYL and LIPOCYTE are the only eight-letter words that can be formed from the Scrabble tiles CILOPTY plus a blank.
  • The eight-letter word ANGRIEST (and anagrams such as GANTRIES and INGRATES) has over 100 blanagrams that are common words, and many more that are more obscure.
  • The word FILMCARD has only one acceptable blanagram: FLUIDRAM. (However, some other dictionaries list other possibilities, such as FRICADEL[1] and FILECARD[2]).
  • Turkish is a blanagram of Kurdish.
  • Pangram, Tangram and Managua are blanagrams of the word anagram.

Many seven- and eight-letter words, such as KILOVOLT and QUIXOTIC, have no acceptable blanagrams; such words typically contain a subset of the letters JKQVWXZ.

References

  1. "Fricadel definition - Dictionary - MSN Encarta". Archived from the original on 2011-06-04. Retrieved 2010-02-08.
  2. "filecard" via The Free Dictionary.
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