find all the words that can be built using the letters in a list, as in Scrabble™.

scrabblewords.py

#!/usr/bin/env python
# coding: utf-8

"""
scrabblewords.py - find all the words that can be built using the letters 
in a list, as in Scrabble™.
"""
import codecs
words = codecs.open('/usr/share/dict/words',mode='rU', encoding='utf-8').readlines()
words = [word.strip() for word in words]

def has_all_letters(this,that):
  """if all the letters of this word are also in that word, return true"""
  return set(this).issubset(that)

def scrabblewords(tiles, dictionary=words):
  for word in dictionary:
    if has_all_letters( word, tiles) and \
      all([(word.count(letter) <= tiles.count(letter)) for letter in word]):
     print word
     
if __name__ == "__main__":
  import sys
  tiles = sys.argv[1]
  scrabblewords(tiles, words)