Coronavirus Disease 2019

The Fascination With Anagrams

Ten “reverse” puzzles.

Posted December 10, 2022 | Reviewed by Vanessa Lancaster

Key points

Anagrams are challenging word puzzles that have had different meanings and functions throughout history.
Anagrams were once believed to be prophetic messages. In modernity, writers have used them to imbue their works with mystery.
Today, anagrams are seen as challenging puzzles in the "art of language."

Since antiquity, we have been fascinated by a seemingly simple verbal mind game: Can the letters in a word be rearranged to produce another word that reveals a meaning hidden in the original word? This question led to the notion of anagram, once alphabets came onto the scene to represent the pronunciation of words in writing.

In the sixth century BCE, the great mathematician Pythagoras is said to have used anagrams to unravel concealed divinatory meanings in words. Plato also believed that the anagram of one’s name revealed the person’s destiny. The classic example is found in an anecdote told about Alexander the Great (even if it is implausible). During his siege of the city of Tyre, Alexander was particularly troubled by a dream he had in which a satyr appeared to him. The next morning he summoned his soothsayer to interpret the dream, who pointed out to the great king that the word satyr itself harbored the answer because, in Greek, it was an anagram of Tyre is thine. Reassured, Alexander went on to conquer the city on the subsequent day.

Anagrams as Puzzles

It was only after the Renaissance that the belief in anagrams as prophetic messages started to fade, as society began interpreting the symbolic practices of the past in new rational ways. Today, anagrams are seen primarily as recreational word puzzles; but it is not clear when this view crystallized. It can probably be traced to 17th-century France, when King Louis XIII used anagrams as a form of entertainment, hiring a Royal Anagrammatist to devise them for his delectation.

From the French court, the recreational use of anagrams spread throughout Europe. Among the first to turn them into puzzles, as we now perceive them, was Lewis Carroll, who interspersed them throughout his writings (letters, diaries, and novels), even creating anagrams for the names of famous people, of which the following two are now classic: Florence Nightingale = Flit on, cheering angel! William Ewart Gladstone = Wild agitator! Means well!

The spreading popularity of anagrams at the time led to the game of Anagrams–a game using letter tiles to form words. It is considered to be the forerunner of Scrabble. By the 20th century, anagrams became common as part of recreational wordplay. What makes them especially challenging is that they involve different forms: word-to-word anagrams (the letters in evil can be rearranged to produce the words veil, vile, live, and Levi); word-to-phrase (the letters in astronomer can be rewritten as the phrase moon starer); phrase-to-word (the letters in Is pity love? can be rearranged to produce a single word “answer,” Positively); phrase-to-phrase (the letters in the golden days, when rearranged, will yield the phrase, they gladden so).

Interestingly, an anagram for anagrams is Ars Magna, which is Latin for “the great art.” And indeed, they are a form of verbal art, used to provide humor (coronavirus–carnivorous, cheater–teacher, dormitory–dirty room), to create a sense of mystery, as detective story writers have done,, or to reveal the vile minds of the malefactors in such stories.

In The Silence of the Lambs, the malevolent character, Hannibal Lecter, provided detectives with the name of Louis Friend to identify the serial killer they were looking for. But Louis Friend is an anagram for iron sulfide, known as Fool’s Gold. It was a meaningless clue used by Lecter to deride the investigators, showing off his supposed intellectual superiority. So, maybe the real reason why we have been intrigued by anagrams is that they show how language can be used as "a great art" form. Certainly, writers grasped their artistic possibilities.

Reverse Anagrams

The usual type of anagram puzzle involves rearranging the letters of a given word to produce another legitimate word. A “reverse” anagram puzzle (as it can be called) requires us to do the opposite, that is, to reconstruct the anagrams given their meanings. Here is an example:

(a) person identifier, (b) unkind, spiteful

The answer to (a) is name and to (b) it is mean. The words are anagrams. The ten puzzles below fall into this category. In my view, they are much more challenging than the usual anagram puzzles, showing that reverse thinking (meaning-to-word) is truly a challenging “verbal art.”

Puzzles

1. (a) fan, devotee, (b) hitched

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