The word snoop - Ursula Dubosarsky 2009

Anagrams
Letters, letters, letters

Have a look at these pairs of words:

LEMON/MELON

DANCE/CANED

ELVIS/LIVES

Look really hard at the letters. What do you notice about them? Well, in each pair, the two words are made up of exactly the same letters, they’ve just been arranged differently. This is called an anagram. The word comes from two ancient Greek words—ana, meaning “back” or “again,” and gramma,meaning “letter.” When you write the letters again in a different order, you get a whole new word.

Anagrams are often found in puzzle books or crosswords. But ancient Greek philosophers, like Plato and Pythagoras, thought that anagrams were more than just for fun—they believed anagrams revealed hidden meanings in words.

Later, mathematicians and scientists like Galileo used anagrams as a code. They would put their discoveries into anagrams, so they could keep them a secret until they were ready to tell the world.

People have always enjoyed making anagrams out of their own names. An English mathematician, Augustus de Morgan, claimed to have made up about 800 anagrams from his name. King Louis XIII of France even had a Royal Anagrammatist, who would make anagrams of names on request. Twins sometimes have names that are anagrams of each other—like Tania and Anita, Claus and Lucas, or Ernie and Irene.

I wonder if you can make up an anagram of your own name? It doesn’t have to be another name, it can be other words. An anagram of The Word Snoop, for example . . . Aha! Look back at the letter I wrote you at the start of this chapter and see if you can work it out . . .

Writers love anagrams. Samuel Butler wrote a novel about an imaginary country called Erewhon—can you figure out where it is? And what about the land of Tribnia that the Irish writer Jonathan Swift invented in his book Gulliver’s Travels? And in Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, there’s a very unpleasant character called Count Olaf, and another one named Al Funcoot, and another one called Dr. Flacutono, and another, Dr. O. Lucafont, and an even more unsavory medical couple, Dr. Tocuna and Nurse Flo . . .

Until recently, to work out an anagram you had to write all the letters down on a page in different orders, or use letter tiles and mix them up to find another word. It can be really hard to do. But now there are special computer programs that make up anagrams from any words you type in.

Still, it’s fun to do it the old-fashioned way. See if you can work out the anagrams on the following page—or better still, think up some for yourselves!

Anagrams

1. Thorn, Shout, Seat, Stew (Hmm, which direction should we go?)

2. Listen (Where did all the noise go?)

3. Moon Starer (A student of the stars.)

4. Here come dots (Great way to send a message.)

5. The bear’s in (And he’s going to have a long, long nap . . . )