These are lists of words suitable for use in building anagrams. In other words, if you're writing a program to decide what anagrams are possible for the word "program", "go Mr Rap" is valid, but is "arm gorp"? Do you consider "gorp" a word?
There's a lot of subjectivity in selecting words. Do we include words from other languages, like "petit"? Is "q" a word, on the grounds that you can say "'quail' starts with 'q'"? Do we want to include offensive words, including racial slurs?
These lists reflect my preferences but also my laziness. My process was:
- Take an existing list of words
- Sort them by length
- Throw out as many 1-, 2-, and 3-letter words as seems reasonable, because every one of these will lead to a large increase in the number of possible anagrams produced.
- Throw out some offensive words
- Throw out a few other words I happened to notice, like "petit", which, come on, is French.
- Call it done, because who has time to comb through everything?