The two rules that shaped this

We launch on Thursday, so here is the part that usually gets left off a launch page.

Two rules did most of the work.

The first was that nothing would ever be written by hand. Every phrase on the site came out of the search exactly as it came out, and where a famous pair returned nothing but word salad, that pair got dropped rather than helped along. That is why some obvious couples are missing. It made the examples worse and it made the thing worth trusting, and that trade is basically the whole design.

The second was to keep the living out of it. Nobody can control what a set of letters spells. Publishing an unflattering arrangement of a living person's name, or using their name to sell something, is not ours to do — so every example we publish is someone long dead or someone who never lived at all. The rule is about publishing, not about the tool. Putting your own two names in is the thing working exactly as intended.

The rest is arithmetic. Two names go in, every letter in both is pooled, and we read what the pool holds. Now and then it holds a phrase that uses every single letter with none left over. Most pairs don't have one — and when yours doesn't, we say we looked and didn't find one, not that there isn't one.