The word API runs in AWS lambda, so it can take a moment to warm up on a cold start. This API powers my spelling games at orthogra.fish. There's some interesting challenges in efficiently determining what can be spelled with a set of letters. The underlying approach here involves storing a string of sorted letters for each entry. Then you can perform a 'text matching' lookup for each sorted subset of letters from the search string.

Take for example the corpus: [act, chat, cat, ha, ah]. Here are the processed records for the corpus:

        word | sorted
        --------------
        chat | acht
        act  | act
        cat  | act
        ah   | ah
        ha   | ah
      

You can see already how we have some 'doubles' in the sorted column. So if we take the search string "cat", and sort it ("act"), we can find entries for both act AND cat for the price of a single match.

Fundamentally, this approach lets us search against a set of combinations, instead of the much larger set of permutations.