OK, this uses some fairly naive heuristics to narrow down the search field. I'm sure somebody can do better, though I'd be fairly surprised if anybody came up with an answer that differed from mine by more than 2 letters.

use v5.14;
use Sort::Key::Top 'nkeytopsort';

sub sort_letters {
    my @letters = split '', $_[0];
    join '', sort @letters;
}

sub can_make {
    my ($letters, $word) = @_;
    $word = join '.*', sort split '', $word;
    $letters =~ qr{$word};
}

say "Reading words from dictionary...";
open my $dict, '<', '/usr/share/dict/words';
chomp( my @WORDS = map lc, grep length($_) <= 9, <$dict> );

say "Scoring microcombinations...";
my %SCORE; $SCORE{ sort_letters($_) }++ for @WORDS;
my @GOOD = nkeytopsort { $SCORE{$_} } -40 => keys %SCORE;

say "Generating candidate answers...";
my %CANDIDATES;
for my $x (@GOOD)
{
    for my $y (@GOOD)
    {
        for my $z (@GOOD)
        {
            my $letters = sort_letters substr("$x$y$z", 0, 8);
            $CANDIDATES{$letters}++;
        }
    }
}
my @VERYGOOD = nkeytopsort { $SCORE{$_} } -40 => keys %CANDIDATES;

say "Finding best candidate answer...";
my %RESULTS = map {
    my $letters  = $_;
    my @can_make = grep can_make($letters, $_), @WORDS;
    say "   $letters - ", scalar(@can_make);
    $letters => \@can_make;
} @VERYGOOD;
my ($BEST) = nkeytopsort { scalar @{$RESULTS{$_}} } -1 => @VERYGOOD;

say "BEST: $BEST";
say for sort @{$RESULTS{$BEST}};

[download]

The dictionary used was the standard /usr/share/dict/words supplied with Ubuntu 13.04.

The best set of letters it found was "aeinprst" which could make 426 words. (The list appears to have some duplicates because some words appear in /usr/share/dict/words more than once with different cases.)

use Moops; class Cow :rw { has name => (default => 'Ermintrude') }; say Cow->new->name

In reply to Re: Challenge: 8 Letters, Most Words by tobyink
in thread Challenge: 8 Letters, Most Words by Limbic~Region

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