What Is an Anagram? The Same Letters Saying Something Else
By the BrainSnail editorial team. How these articles are written and checked, and how to tell us when one is wrong.
Rearranging the letters of a word or phrase to make another is a trivial game and was once a serious device, used to claim scientific priority, to conceal authorship and to make statements that could not safely be made directly.
What makes one good
A rearrangement that produces a sequence of letters is easy and one that produces a meaningful phrase is not, since letter frequencies constrain what is possible and English has an awkward abundance of some letters and shortage of others. What distinguishes a memorable anagram from a mere valid one is relevance, meaning that the rearrangement says something about its source, which converts a coincidence into an observation. The best-known examples are celebrated precisely because the result comments on the original rather than merely existing. Length works against quality, since a longer phrase offers more letters and more possibilities while also making it harder to produce something coherent, and the sweet spot is generally short phrases. Perfect anagrams use every letter exactly once, and imperfect ones that add or drop letters are generally regarded as cheating. Computer search finds candidates trivially and cannot judge relevance, which is why the interesting part of the activity resisted automation.
The serious uses
The device had genuine functions before it became a pastime:
- •Scientific priority claims, where a discovery was published as an anagram so that the finder could prove precedence later without revealing the result, used by Galileo for observations of Venus and Saturn and by Hooke for his law of elasticity
- •Pseudonyms constructed by rearranging a real name, which conceals authorship while permitting later identification, used by writers from Voltaire to modern novelists
- •Divination and mystical interpretation, where rearranging a name was held to reveal something about its bearer, which is a serious practice in several traditions
- •Political concealment, where a statement too dangerous to make openly could be embedded
- •Puzzle construction, which is where most encounter them now, with cryptic crossword clues using anagram indicators to signal the device
- •Titles and names in fiction, where an anagram plants a clue that a reader may or may not notice
The priority trick
Publishing a result as an anagram solved a specific seventeenth-century problem. Establishing who discovered something first mattered for reputation and occasionally for money, and publication was slow while private correspondence was unreliable. Announcing a result plainly allowed others to claim it or to be scooped in the reverse direction, while saying nothing risked being anticipated. An anagram circulated to colleagues established a date and a content that could be revealed later, and it gave the finder time to confirm the observation before committing. Galileo did this for the phases of Venus and for the appearance of Saturn, whose rings his telescope could not resolve and which he described in a scrambled sentence about a triple body. Hooke published his law as a Latin anagram in 1676 and revealed it two years later. The practice faded as journals with dated publication provided a reliable and public alternative, which is what the modern preprint and submission date does.
The puzzle tradition
Anagrams are a staple of word puzzles and the conventions are worth knowing. Cryptic crossword clues signal the device with an indicator word suggesting disorder, movement or change, so words including confused, broken, cooked, wild and about all mark an anagram and the letters to be rearranged are supplied in the clue alongside a definition. Learning to spot the indicator is most of what makes cryptic clues solvable. Other word games including letter tile games depend on rapid mental rearrangement, which is a trainable skill and is not strongly related to vocabulary size. Solvers develop letter-pattern recognition rather than searching systematically, which is why experienced solvers see solutions immediately while being unable to explain how. Software makes finding anagrams trivial, which changed competitive play in several games and shifted the skill towards judgement about which of many valid options to use given the board and the remaining letters.
The takeaway
Producing valid letters is easy and producing a relevant phrase is not, which is what distinguishes a memorable rearrangement from a coincidence. Galileo and Hooke published discoveries as anagrams to establish priority while withholding the result, a practice that faded once dated journal publication offered something better. Cryptic clues signal the device with a word suggesting disorder.