Count the number of each letter you have (minus blanks). Count the number of blanks. Now count the number of each letter in the word you want to check for a match. For each letter that is NOT in the original letter set, decrement the number of blanks by 1. If the number of blanks goes below 0, the word can not be formed by your letter set.

A very simple linear matching algorithm. Something like the following: 

use strict;
use warnings;

my $letters = 'balphe_';
my (%lhash, @solutions, $blanks, $bcopy, $l);

$blanks++ while $letters =~ s/[^a-z]//;
$lhash{$_}++ for split //, $letters;

while (<DATA>) {
    $bcopy = $blanks;
    my %whash; chomp; $whash{$_}++ for split //;

    for $l (keys %whash) {
        no warnings;
        last if $lhash{$l} < $whash{$l} &&
            ($bcopy -= $whash{$l} - $lhash{$l}) < 0;
    }
    push @solutions, $_ if $bcopy > -1;
}

print join "\n",
    sort {length($b) <=> length($a) || $a cmp $b}
    @solutions;

__DATA__
alpha
beta
gamma
delta
epsilon

[download]
I sort of slapped this together on the spot, so don't expect it to be pretty. It should work, however.

In reply to Re: scrambling all letters in a word until all combinations are found by TedPride
in thread scrambling all letters in a word until all combinations are found by Anonymous Monk

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