50 Fun Facts About Anagrams

In the Harry Potter books, 'Tom Marvolo Riddle' is rearranged to spell 'I am' followed by which villain's name?

Lord Voldemort is the title young Riddle builds from his own letters, a reveal saved for the second book. Translators often change his birth name so the trick still works in other languages.

Which city, Japan's capital for more than a thousand years, has a name that is an anagram of 'Tokyo'?

Kyoto housed Japan's imperial court from 794 until the emperor moved east in the 19th century, which is why it is nicknamed the thousand-year capital.

The phrase 'twelve plus one' is a perfect anagram of another sum of thirteen, adding which two numbers?

Eleven and two, written out as 'eleven plus two', reuses every letter of 'twelve plus one'. Each phrase is also thirteen letters long, matching the total of both sums.

Which American pop star, baptized a Southern Baptist, has a full name that is an anagram of 'Presbyterians'?

Britney Spears shares all thirteen of her letters with 'Presbyterians', but she grew up in a different flock and sang in a church choir as a child.

Disney's Mary Poppins credits the old banker Mr. Dawes to 'Navckid Keyd', an anagram of which actor's name?

Dick Van Dyke played the ancient banker as well as Bert, the nanny's closest friend. In the end titles the scrambled credit rearranges itself on screen to reveal his real name.

Which fruit, celebrated in the nickname of the US state of Georgia, is an anagram of the word 'cheap'?

Peach reshuffles the five letters of 'cheap'. Georgia is known as the Peach State, though it also answers to the grander nickname Empire State of the South.

Which Asian capital, on the island of Luzon, has a name that is an anagram of the word 'animal'?

Manila only looks zoological. Its name comes from a Filipino phrase usually read as the place where indigo plants, or nilad plants, are abundant.

Which British star of the original Star Wars has a name that rearranges into the compliment 'genuine class'?

Alec Guinness played Obi-Wan Kenobi, the part that won him an Oscar nomination and a new generation of fans.

Which 1999 film about a coal miner's son has a title that is an anagram of Rocket Boys, the memoir it adapts?

October Sky became the title because, author Homer Hickam said, studio research found that women over thirty would not go to see a film called Rocket Boys.

Which six-letter word can be made by rearranging the letters of either 'listen' or 'tinsel'?

Silent belongs to one of the busiest letter sets in English: the same six letters also spell 'enlist' and 'inlets'.

Which BBC science-fiction spin-off takes its title from an anagram once used as a decoy label for Doctor Who?

Torchwood was the fake title given to early episodes of the revived series so the footage would not be intercepted. The word was later reused for the spin-off.

Galileo announced a discovery as a scrambled Latin anagram; which planet had his telescope shown in a 'triple form'?

Saturn looked like three bodies because his telescope showed its rings only as bumps. Johannes Kepler unscrambled the message wrongly and decided it was about moons of Mars.

Which Surrealist painter did André Breton mock with the money-minded anagram 'Avida Dollars'?

Salvador Dalí got the nickname from the Surrealist leader, who coined it to tarnish the painter's reputation by implying he cared mostly about cash.

Which rock and roll pioneer has a first name that is an anagram of both 'lives' and 'evils'?

Elvis Presley's first name is a five-letter jackpot for puzzle fans: the same letters also spell 'veils' and 'Levis'.

Which organ of the human body has a name that is an anagram of 'earth', the planet we live on?

Heart is one of several words hiding in the same five letters, along with 'hater' and Herat, a city in Afghanistan.

Which Greater Manchester market town, known for its black pudding, has a name that is an anagram of 'ruby'?

Bury sells its black pudding at a famous open-air market. The town was also the birthplace of Robert Peel, the prime minister who founded London's police force.

In Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, a dying curator leaves a cryptic message hiding an anagram in which Paris museum?

The Louvre is where the curator is shot, and the story circles back to it: the last clue points beneath the museum's inverted glass pyramid.

On which British game show does each episode end with a race to solve a nine-letter anagram called the conundrum?

Countdown saves its conundrum for last, as a buzzer round. In the earlier letters rounds, players build the longest word they can from nine randomly chosen letters.

Which California city, next to the Mexican border, has a name that is an anagram of the word 'diagnose'?

San Diego sits beside Tijuana, and the San Ysidro crossing that links them is among the busiest land border crossings in the world.

Which month, named after the Roman god of war, has a name that is an anagram of the word 'charm'?

March honours Mars, whom the Romans also counted as an ancestor of their people through his sons Romulus and Remus.

Which Las Vegas rock band says its name is an anagram of a phrase known only to its members?

Imagine Dragons have never revealed the phrase, though singer Dan Reynolds says every member approved it. One possible rearrangement, Ragged Insomnia, is the name of their recording studio.

In which 1968 horror film does the heroine work out that her neighbour Roman Castevet's name is an anagram?

Rosemary's Baby turns on the clue: the neighbour's name rearranges into Steven Marcato, the son of a reputed Satanist who once lived in the same building.

Which English scientist first stated his law of springs as the alphabetical Latin anagram 'ceiiinosssttuv'?

Robert Hooke printed the scrambled letters to claim the idea without giving it away. The solution he published later was a Latin motto meaning 'as the extension, so the force'.

What do word-puzzle fans call an anagram pair such as 'restful' and 'fluster', or 'funeral' and 'real fun'?

Antigram is the term for an anagram that means the opposite of its original. Anagrams can lean the other way too: 'angered' and 'enraged' mean almost the same thing.

The word 'anagram' comes from which ancient language, joining words meaning 'back' and 'letter'?

Greek supplied both halves: 'ana', back or backwards, and 'gramma', a letter. The word reached English in the 1580s by way of French or scholarly Latin.

Which English city, whose royal house wore the red rose, has a name that is an anagram of 'ancestral'?

Lancaster gave its name to the royal house that fought York in the Wars of the Roses. Students at both cities' universities still replay the rivalry in a sports tournament each year.

Which Victorian reformer's name can be rearranged into the 19th-century tribute 'Flit on, cheering angel'?

Florence Nightingale, the nurse of the Crimean War, was a natural subject at a time when turning famous names into anagrams was a popular Victorian pastime.

Which American singer, born Ashley Frangipane, took a stage name that is an anagram of her own first name?

Halsey doubles as a nod to the Halsey Street subway station in Brooklyn, a place where the singer spent a lot of time as a teenager.

Which noble gas, the third most abundant gas in the air, is an anagram of both 'groan' and 'organ'?

Argon makes up almost one percent of the atmosphere. Its name means lazy or inactive, a nod to the fact that it undergoes almost no chemical reactions.

Which tile game invented by Rhode Island's Nathanson family has players shout 'Peel!' when their letters run out?

Bananagrams is a race: each player builds a personal grid of connected words, and a shout of 'Peel!' makes everyone draw a new tile.

Which French king, served by Cardinal Richelieu, kept Thomas Billon on a salary as his Royal Anagrammatist?

Louis XIII paid his anagram-maker 1,200 livres a year. His chief minister, Cardinal Richelieu, was flattered with a French anagram likening him to the hand of Hercules.

Vivian Darkbloom, a character whose name is an anagram of the author's own, appears in which 1955 novel?

Lolita was meant to come out under a pseudonym, so Vladimir Nabokov planted Vivian Darkbloom to tip off alert readers about who had really written it.

Which French writer's pen name is usually explained as an anagram of 'Arovet li', a Latinized spelling of his surname?

Voltaire began life as plain Arouet, and the extra letters stand for 'le jeune', the younger. One biographer adds that the name was also meant to suggest speed and daring.

Which Scottish city on the Firth of Tay has a name that is an anagram of the word 'denude'?

Dundee earned the epithet the city of jute, jam and journalism, after the industries behind its rapid growth in the 19th century.

Which Surrey town, home of the Derby horse race, has a name that is an anagram of the word 'poems'?

Epsom also gave its name to Epsom salts: the water from a spring on its common turned out to be rich in magnesium sulphate.

The word 'anagrams' can itself be rearranged into which Latin phrase, meaning 'the great art'?

Ars magna is not the only self-portrait in the letters: the singular 'anagram' shuffles into 'nag a ram', which Google has offered as a joke suggestion to people searching for the word.

Brian Eno's song 'King's Lead Hat' takes its title from an anagram of which New York band he later produced?

Talking Heads became more than a title joke for Eno: he went on to produce the band's second, third and fourth albums, including Remain in Light.

Which newspaper puzzle, created by comic artist Martin Naydel, has solvers unscramble words to answer a cartoon clue?

Jumble dates from 1954 and usually sets four scrambled words. Marked letters from the solutions then spell the answer to the drawing's clue, which is often a pun.

Which day of the week, named after the Moon, is an anagram of the word 'dynamo'?

Monday takes its name from the Moon in many languages, a habit that goes back to the Latin phrase for 'day of the Moon'.

Which Asian country, home to the Buddha's traditional birthplace at Lumbini, is an anagram of both 'plane' and 'panel'?

Nepal dates its recorded history from Lumbini: the emperor Ashoka made a pilgrimage there and raised a pillar whose inscription is the starting point.

Which English writer titled his 1872 utopian novel Erewhon, an anagram of the word 'nowhere'?

Samuel Butler drew on his own four years as a sheep farmer in New Zealand for the opening chapters, in which the hidden country is discovered.

In The Silence of the Lambs, Lecter's false lead 'Louis Friend' is an anagram of the chemical name for what?

Fool's gold is iron sulfide, the phrase Clarice Starling spots in the name. In the original novel the false lead is Billy Rubin instead, a pun on a pigment found in bile.

Which French Renaissance writer published Pantagruel under the anagram pen name Alcofribas Nasier?

François Rabelais, a physician by profession, signed his first book with the anagram. Pantagruel appeared around 1532 but is now usually printed second, after the tale of the giant's father, Gargantua.

Which 1992 Robert Redford caper film centres on a black box codenamed Setec Astronomy, an anagram hiding a clue?

Sneakers casts Redford as the leader of a team of security specialists. Once the codename is unscrambled, one of them locks everyone in the office until the box can go to the NSA.

Which Canadian rock trio recorded 'Anagram (for Mongo)', a song whose lines form words from the letters of other words?

Rush put the song on the 1989 album Presto. Its title borrows the name of Mongo, a character in the Mel Brooks comedy Blazing Saddles.

The Latin anagram 'Honor est a Nilo', meaning honour is from the Nile, celebrates which British admiral?

Horatio Nelson earned the tribute at the Battle of the Nile, where he decisively defeated the French fleet that had escorted Napoleon's army to Egypt.

Which Scrabble variant, named with an anagram of 'Scrabble', lets players lay a word's tiles in any order?

Clabbers is played for fun by tournament regulars. If a play is challenged, its maker has to name an acceptable word that the tiles could spell.

Which room of the house has a name that is an anagram of the seven-letter word 'thicken'?

Kitchen is the everyday word hiding in 'thicken'. Fittingly for a pair linked by sauces, it comes down from a Latin verb meaning to cook.

Which Berkshire town, the setting of the BBC sitcom The Office, has a name that is an anagram of 'ghouls'?

Slough is more than a sitcom backdrop: its trading estate is the largest industrial estate in single private ownership in Europe.

Which country at the southern end of the Arabian Peninsula has a name that is an anagram of the word 'enemy'?

Yemen was for centuries a primary producer of coffee, shipped out through the port of Mocha, until Europeans smuggled the trees away to grow in their own colonies.