The Surprisingly Long History of Anagrams
An anagram is a word or phrase made by rearranging the letters of another. LISTEN becomes SILENT; DORMITORY becomes DIRTY ROOM. It is one of the simplest kinds of wordplay there is, and one of the oldest. People have been shuffling letters for fun, for flattery and even for science for more than two thousand years.
Flattery at an ancient court
The earliest anagrams usually credited to a named writer come from Lycophron, a Greek poet working in the 3rd century BC at the court of Ptolemy II in Alexandria, Egypt. He is said to have flattered his royal patrons by rearranging their names. The king's name, PTOLEMAIOS, became APO MELITOS, "made of honey". Queen ARSINOE became ION HERAS, "violet of Hera".
The idea that a name could hide a second meaning took hold. For centuries, people treated anagrams of names as playful, and sometimes as genuinely revealing.
A royal anagrammatist
Anagrams were especially fashionable in 16th- and 17th-century Europe. Courtiers composed them as compliments, poets used them in verse, and some people took them seriously as clues to a person's character or fate. The best-known story of the craze is that King Louis XIII of France gave a man named Thomas Billon a salary simply to make anagrams for the court, making him, in effect, a royal anagrammatist.
Scientists hiding their discoveries
Some of the most famous anagrams in history were not jokes at all. Before scientific journals existed, a researcher who had made a discovery but was not ready to publish faced a problem: how do you prove you got there first without giving the idea away?
The answer was to publish an anagram. In 1610, Galileo sent other astronomers a jumble of letters. Rearranged, they formed a Latin sentence meaning roughly "I have observed the highest planet to be triple-bodied", his description of what we now know are Saturn's rings, seen through an early telescope.
In 1676, the English scientist Robert Hooke published the letters CEIIINOSSSTTUV. Two years later he revealed the solution: UT TENSIO, SIC VIS, "as the extension, so the force". It is the principle we now call Hooke's law, which describes how springs stretch.
Hidden names in literature
Writers have long used anagrams as pen names. The French author François Rabelais published his comic novels in the 1530s under the name Alcofribas Nasier, an anagram of his own name. Centuries later, readers of the Harry Potter books met one of the most famous fictional anagrams: TOM MARVOLO RIDDLE rearranges into I AM LORD VOLDEMORT.
Anagrams today
Anagrams never went away; they simply moved into games. Word puzzles in newspapers, cryptic crossword clues, Scrabble racks and the nine-letter Countdown Conundrum on British television are all, at heart, anagram puzzles. Every time you look at a jumble of letters and try to see a word, you are doing exactly what Lycophron was doing more than two thousand years ago.
A few classics to try
- ASTRONOMER = MOON STARER
- THE EYES = THEY SEE
- ELEVEN PLUS TWO = TWELVE PLUS ONE
- CONVERSATION = VOICES RANT ON
- LISTEN = SILENT = ENLIST = TINSEL
Want to find anagrams of your own? Type any word into our anagram solver and see what it rearranges into.
Related reading: How to unscramble words · Palindromes · Words with the most anagrams
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