A bit of Googling around this topic led me to this article, which is pretty comprehensive:

http://sqlperformance.com/2012/07/t-sql-queries/split-strings

I see. I'm not sure I'd call that recursion, but it's a neat trick.

Here's another approach using a recursive CTE. I haven't coded it up as a function or catered...

This is a nice function but I don't see any recursion, at least not as I understand it. What exactly do you mean?

I second searching for individual words, not permutations. The permutation approach scales horribly: 10 words give you 3.6M permutiations; 12 words give you 480M

Now you might assume the user will...