How do I make Grep less Greedy with a shell variable?

I have been polishing up my grep skills with a particular problem I have found. Basically it goes like this. I have a local file with words from a dictionary. The user will pass in a word and the script will find all words that can be made with letters from that word. The catch is, the words must be at least 4 characters long and you can only use as many letters as the user passes in. So if I passed in a word like "College" clee and cell would be acceptable words but not words like cocco because yes it contains letters from the word but college only has 1 o and 1 c. Here is my regular expression thus far.

egrep -i "^[("$text")]{4,}$" /usr/dict/words

This will find strings that contain these letters that are at least four characters long however grep is being greedy and grabbing more characters than those in the variable. How would I specify to only use the amount of characters in the variable? I've been stuck on this for a few days now to no avail. Thank you for your help and time community!