Hi.

Thank you for your help. With your code there, it appears it does exactly what I needed. But when I changed it to read in my partial dictionary file, it started to throw out words that it couldn't have matched.

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use CGI qw/:standard/;
print header, start_html();

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

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

open (DICT, "dict/dict1.txt") or die "error :!";

while (<DICT>) {
    $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;

exit;
__DATA__
alpha
beta
gamma
delta
epsilon
[download]

resulted in:

alephs behalf blahes bleach chapel Alpha Calpe abele abler ables albae
+ aleph amble ample apple babel bagel baled baler bales basel bathe be
+ach belah belay belch belga bella blade blahs blame blare blase blaze
+ bleak blear bleat bleep bohea cable caleb chape cheap chela chelp Ab
+el Ahab Alba Cape Cheb abbe abed abeg abet able ably ache ahem aiel a
+ile alae alap albs alec alee ales alex aloe alps aped aper apes apex 
+apse axel axle babe bade bael bagh baht bail bake bald bale bali balk
+ ball balm bane bare base bash bate bawl bead beak beam bean beat bea
+u beep bela bell belt bema beth bhan bile blab blah
[download]

It matched "behalf" which, with the letters, couldn't have matched. Any suggestions?