Anagram

the transposition of the letters of a word or sentence, by which a new word or sentence is formed.

Interesting anagrams should have a relation with the original.

Example: astronomers = moon-starers (from Hoffmann's Puzzles Old and New).
Whole sentences can be anagrammed: "the best things in life are free" = "nail-biting refreshes the feet"

The word comes from greek ana=backwards and gramma=letter, so it was initially a word written backwards (example: doom = mood).

Related to anagrams are palindromes:
these are symetric words or whole sentences which remain unchanged (except for spaces between words) if written backwards.
For example, the first words ever spoken form a palindrome: "Madam, I'm Adam". Of cause, the answer was also a palindrome: "Eve"!
Another famous palindrome is the Panama-plan: A man a plan a canal - Panama!
Finally, the fear of palindromes is called: aibohphobia .

There is a newsgroup devoted to anagrams: alt.anagrams
There is a FAQ about this newsgroup, written by Larry Brash: http://www.anagrammy.com/anagrams/index.html

Anagrams generated by computer

Here are two popular programs:

ANAGRAM GENIUS ( http://www.anagramgenius.com/) is a commercial product by William Tunstall-Pedoe;

WORDPLAY ( http://home.hiwaay.net/~criswell/wordplay/wordplay.html) is a freeware program by Evans A Criswell.

Other programs could be found in the archives of comp.games.sources.

There are also online anagram generators which can be used from the World-Wide Web:

• Andy's Anagram Solver
• Brendan's Amazing Anagram Generator
• I, Rearrangement Servant
• Inge's Anagram Generator (English, Norwegian, Spanish)

Anagram programs work with a wordlist. That list can be replaced by another one; I tried french and german wordlists from the internet, but to my disappointment I found out that in these languages, it is much rarer to generate meaningful anagrams (one reason is: in english, most words can be used in many contexts, for example "drink" could be a noun or a verb, and as verb it is almost invariant; whereas in other languages, verbs have many different endings, so a random anagram seldomly gives a grammatically correct sentence).

Anagram quiz

Examples that I generated myself can now be found on several pages, regrouped by subjects:

• Quiz 1 : Towns
• Quiz 2 : Animals
• Quiz 3 : Actresses and Actors
• Quiz 4 : Countries

Anagram fun

Here are other funny examples of anagrams I generated:

• One-words

Created 1996-12-08, Last updated 2003-03-23
Mail any suggestions to phahn@vo.lu (Patrick Hahn)
Homepage http://www2.vo.lu/homepages/phahn/default.htm