Coding interview questionMedium
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Group Words by Letter Composition

Given a list of lowercase words, group together the words that share the exact same multiset of letters.

1. Problem Statement

You are given a list of lowercase words. Group together words that are rearrangements of each other's letters, and return the groups.

2. Live Coding Format

Work in the provided coding workspace while explaining your decisions to the live interviewer. Validation may use inline tests, examples, comments, or a verbal walkthrough.

3. Key Focus Areas

  • 1
    Problem clarification and contract
  • 2
    Approach exploration and optimality
  • 3
    Think-aloud communication and pacing
  • 4
    Implementation correctness
  • 5
    Code quality and language fluency
  • 6
    Tests and dry run
  • 7
    Debugging and self-correction
  • 8
    Complexity analysis
  • 9
    Follow-up performance

4. What Strong Candidates Should Demonstrate

  • Clarify grouping semantics, ordering guarantees, and character-set assumptions before coding.
  • Explain a naive pairwise baseline and improve it to a near-linear grouping approach.
  • Think aloud while implementing readable, correct grouping logic.
  • Validate with explicit expected outputs and a top-to-bottom dry run.
  • Analyze time and space complexity and pace the core problem to leave room for a coding follow-up.

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Practice this problem in the live coding workspace while the interviewer probes your clarification, implementation, trade-offs, and validation.

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Core Concepts

Hidden because they name the technique, which a real interviewer would not tell you.

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ArraysHash MapsString CanonicalizationComplexity Analysis

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