Oops, looks like I was beaten by cgrand himself. https://github.com/cgrand/parsnip

I was interested in "kangaroo"; Wikipedia suggests a kangaroo word should, in addition to having the same letters and in the same order as its parent, also have the same meaning (eg. masculine -> male), so "parse" isn't quite a kangaroo for "parsley", apparently. It'd be a moderately fun little challenge to write a little program to find some kangaroos - though Wiktionary (predictably) has a nice list already here: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Kangaroo_words

"Parsley" is indeed a great name. I'll contribute another Parsley - a Flex framework of yore also bore that name.

I'm afraid there's https://github.com/darius/parson already too. (I went through the same process to name it -- there's not much left in that well, is there?)

> grep /usr/share/dict/words -e "^pars[^']<star>[^s]$"

(I changed a literal asterisk to <star> to avoid formatting.) You get a few more options if you remove the anchor at the beginning:

    grep /usr/share/dict/words -e "pars[^']<star>[^s]$"

For example, 'sparse' seems like a good name for a lightweight parser library.