I can work out how to create anagrams of a string but I don't know how I can compare them to a dictionary of real words to check if the anagram is a real word. Is there a class in the Java API that contains the entire English dictionary?
No, but you can get a wordlist from various places. From there, you could read the wordlist file into a list:
List<String> lines = new ArrayList<String>();
BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new FileReader("wordlist.txt"));
String line = null;
while (null!=(line=in.readLine()))
{
lines.add(line);
}
in.close();
And finally binary search use lines.contains()
for your candidate word.