Monday, December 21, 2015

Falling In Love With Anagrams


Anagrams are nothing more than taking a word and rearranging its letters to form a new word.  It’s especially cool when you can create words of opposites using the same letters.

Some words can’t be turned into anything else, like “writer” or “author.”  Some words can be inverted, such as “keep” and “peek”.  Some words take some thought.  “Diamond” could be “midland” or “mondial.”

A useful site for anagrams is www.wordplays.com.  In addition to showing you anagrams, it can show you words that stat with a particular word, words that end with that word, or words that merely contain that word.  For instance, type in “shit” and we find 23 words, from 5-12 letters long, that contain, start, or end with the synonym for “dung.  The site also offers definitions of all words.

Scrabble players should love this site.  Really, anyone amused by language, word play, and culture should check it out.

Another site worth seeing is www.manythings.org.  It shows you 600 anagrams, arranged by word length or topics.  Who knew so many words come from the same letters?

Another site, www.fun-with-words.com, shows words strung together to form anagram phrase that relate to each other, such as:

The eyes
They see

Debit card
Bad credit

The Morse code
Here come dots

Schoolmaster
The classroom

Eleven plus two
Twelve plus one

Desperation
A rope ends it

The site also features:
*Anagrams of sayings and sentences
*Very long anagrams
*Anagrams of famous people’s names
*Celebrity one-word anagrams

It also had a section on crude anagrams, including:

I have a large penis
He is plain average

Large breasts
Great braless

President Clinton of the USA
To copulate, he finds interns

The menage a trois
A giant threesome

Husband and wife
Fun was had in bed

www.word-buff.com points out alphagrams as a way of solving anagrams.  Alphagrams put the letters of a word in alphabetical order.

Why do writers love words so much?  We all seem to enjoy nuances, history, and quirks as it relates to the alphabet, the dictionary, and the language.  Anagrams, synonyms, homonyms, spelling, compound words, and all of the sideshow oddities draw us in, with childlike curiosity.  We love word games, from Scrabble and crossword puzzles to jumbo word searches and Hangman.  We love how so many things seem to attach themselves to a letter, word, or phrase, as if we can decode life by understanding such things as palindromes or rhymes.

For word junkies, check out these sites:

By the way, “anagram” doesn’t have an anagram.

Ok, word nerds, I leave you with this: “Rhythms” is the longest word in English without the standard vowels, a, e, i, o, or u. Also, there is only one common word in English that has five vowels in a row, “queueing.”

I leave you with some sample anagrams:

Bats
Stab

Note
Tone

Skill
Kills

Flow
Wolf

Nap
Pan

Ton
Not

Rock
Cork

Cape
Pace

Silent
Listen

Slut
Lust

War
Raw

Spit
Pits

Top
Pot

Team
Meat

Shit
Hits

Live
Evil

United
Untied

Maps
Spam

Pines
Spine

Kids
Skid

West
Stew

Rise
Sire

Words
Sword

Penis
Spine

Cares
Scare

Snot
Tons

Fats
Fast

Last
Salt

Weird
Wired

Dog
God

Death
Hated

Cloud
Could

Carp
Crap

Hate
Heat

Iced
Dice

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