Anagram Detection | Dataford Interview Questions

Microsoft Teams needs to identify whether two lowercase words contain exactly the same letters, with the same frequency, regardless of order. Given two strings, determine whether they are anagrams.

Two words are anagrams when one can be rearranged to form the other. The strings contain only lowercase English letters, and no spaces or punctuation need to be handled.

Formal Specification

Implement are_anagrams(word1, word2).

Input: Two strings, word1 and word2, containing lowercase letters from a through z.
Output: Return True if the strings are anagrams; otherwise, return False.
Character order does not matter, but character counts must match exactly.

Constraints

0 <= len(word1), len(word2) <= 10^5
Each character is a lowercase English letter.
Character order does not affect the result.

Function Signature

def are_anagrams(word1, word2):

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Problem