English for Students

Types of Anagrams

Here are some of the funniest and best Types of Anagrams. They are mostly well-known amongst anagrammists.

If we drop the (somewhat fuzzy and subjective) celebrity requirement, and just use the names of ordinary but real people, how much better can be done? The longest we were able to find is Carolyn McAlister (16 letters), a transposal of the boldface Web3 word MACROCRYSTALLINE. The best 17-letter near miss I came across is Herbert Eisenstadt (BITTERHEARTEDNESS - a reasonable coinage. That both of these people actually exist is attested to by the Yahoo yellow pages directory (http://people.yahoo.com). Our ordinary-people search was fairly extensive but by no means exhaustive. So it is possible that these records can be bettered.Here are some of the funniest and best Types of Anagrams. They are mostly well-known amongst anagrammists.

An anagram is a rearrangement of the letters in either a word or a phrase (using each letter exactly once in the word or phrase created).

Ideally the anagram created relates in some (perhaps humorous) way to the original word or phrase. Such anagrams are described as cognate. The best anagrams are grammatically correct and use techniques such as abbreviating and to 'n' only minimally.

The anagrams on this site are mainly humorous cognate anagrams. Generally the best ones are of the names of famous people or institutions, particularly those with relevance to recent major events in the news. Other witty anagrams include definitions (e.g. A shoplifter… Has to pilfer) pairs of questions and answers where each is an anagram of the other (e.g. Eleven plus two... Twelve plus one) and completed sentences (e.g. Circumstantial evidence can ruin a selected victim).

Several words are used to describe different varieties of anagrams, particularly amongst the online anagramming community. Many of these words are not generally accepted words that you will find in dictionaries.

Types of Anagrams are:

Ambigram = An anagram which is ambiguously opposite to the original phrase, such as The Nuclear Regulatory Commission = your rules clone atomic nightmares.

Anigram or animagram = an animation (usually in a computer format) showing the letters of a word or phrase moving as they rearrange to form an anagram.

Antigram = An anagram which is antonymous of the original phrase, such as violence = nice love.



Pairagram = A transposed couplet in which the anagrams are linked in meaning, or form a sentence when juxtaposed. Examples are Elvis = lives andmarried = admirer.

Pangram = Not really a variety of anagram, but included here because of the similarity in name and meaning. So called perfect pangrams are anagrams of the alphabet, e.g. abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz = Blowzy night-frumps vex'd Jack Q.

Spamagram = A term used exclusively in the newsgroup alt.anagrams. Those who spam the newsgroup (i.e. post irrelevant messages) will find their words anagrammed by alt.anagrams regulars. The resulting anagrams are termed spamagrams.

Synanagram = Single words that are anagrams of other single words, such as angered = enraged.

Trianagram = Also called triplets, these are three-way anagrams such as mastering = emigrants = streaming.

Here are some of the funniest and best Types of Anagrams. They are mostly well-known amongst anagrammists.

These are short cognate anagrams, often with a humorous link between the word/phrase and its anagram. Here are some of the funniest and best Types of Anagrams. They are mostly well-known amongst anagrammists.

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