Words & WritingGreek → English
Anagram
/ˈænəɡræm/noun
A word or phrase made by rearranging the letters of another.
The Greek roots
ἀνά
aná
back, again
γράμμα
grámma
letter
Literally: “letters over again”
The story of the word
Ancient tradition credits the practice to Lycophron, a poet at the Alexandrian court in the third century BC, though the attribution comes down to us secondhand. The word itself is a late formation that reached English in the 1580s, when rearranging a patron's name into a compliment was a genuine route to employment at court. Scientists later used them to stake a claim without revealing it: Galileo announced Saturn's rings as a jumbled Latin sentence.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Modern Latin → French → English
- First recorded
- 1580s
Same family
grammardiagramprogramepigramtelegram
In a sentence
Someone pointed out that his surname is an anagram of a small Belgian town.