The anagram, also letter return, letter change, or shake word, is a word or a word sequence, which is formed from the letters of another word or another word sequence. It is important that all letters of the original word are used in the later anagram. Thus the noun flour would be an anagram of clay, as it is composed of the same letters. Ambigram and palindrome are similar. Ambigrams are words and symbols which, in the usual representation, look the same as after rotation by 180 °, with palindromes being sequences which are identical forwards and backwards (for example, Otto, pensioner, storage rack, etc.).
Term
The term is derived from the Greek anagraphein, which can be translated with circumscribed. Consequently, translation basically involves what anagram is about. On the one hand, it is actually the actual rewriting of a word, if the letters are rearranged and furthermore anagrams for the encryption can be used – thus also as kind of the circumscription.
The aim of the anagraming is, therefore, that the change creates a new meaning or a new word. A particularly elaborate work is when the anagraming of the original word creates a concept which is related to the original. Let us now look at an exemplary example: Example of an anagram (lamp to traffic light)
In the above example, it can be seen that the word traffic light can be formed from the letters of the word lamp. Since all the letters are used here, we speak of an anagram. Often a word or word sequence can be used to create different words. There is another word for the word “traffic light”: palm. Thus, palm, traffic light and lamp are anagrams of each other. Another example is anagram
The anagraming of the lamp, traffic light and palm leaves whole words. The simplest form of the anagram is, however, the letter-ruler. As such, words are used in which individual letters are twisted or individual syllables have been interchanged, such as, for example, in unemployed, bathedank (database) or mammal’s board, which is often the result of promises.
Anagrams as encryption and puzzles
It has been described that it is an aim of the anagrammization to cube out of a word or word sequence another word, or even a different word sequence, which makes sense. This is not always the case, because sometimes anagrams also come as riddles or as encryption. Here, sometimes synonymous words or seemingly meaningless letters are used.
As an encryption, such anagrams are almost unbreakable, which is due to the fact that from a sequence of letters of sufficient length there are, of course, numerous possibilities of anagramming. If we think about the above examples, we can see what the problem is here: the receiver of the anagram lamp would not know clearly whether the palm or the traffic light is meant. The whole thing is complicated, since it is not always known in which language the anagram was written.
A very popular example for encryption by anagrammization comes from the Italian philosopher, mathematician, physicist and astronomer Galileo Galilei. When Galileo obtained knowledge of the planet Saturn and its rings, he did so with the following anagram: SMAISMRMILMEPOETALEVMIBVNENVGTTAVIRAS. His contemporaries could not, however, decipher the meaning behind it, until Galileo Galilei called the Latin text: Altissimvm planetam tergeminvm observavi (dt: “I watched the highest planet in a three-towered form”).
Galileo mistook the rings of Saturn wrongly for objects to the left and right of the planet, which corrected Christiaan Huygens only 45 years later. In his homage to Galileo, he also published his findings on the planet in the form of an anagram, specifying the letters of the plain text in alphabetical order, which is why his observations could not be deciphered at this time.Christiaan Huygens used an anagram for the rings of Saturn describe
In science, however, such an anagram has a different effect than the simple word play. Anyone who published his theses or insights in this way, in order to re-examine the correctness of his own assertion, could later, if the Klartext was published, show that this realization had already been made in advance.
This made it possible to prove, in hindsight, that one was the first scientist to have the same knowledge. For scientific publications, the first disclosure of a scientific result is referred to as a priority.