The History of Anagrams: From Ancient Greece to Modern Puzzles

Anagrams feel like a modern puzzle, the stuff of newspapers and word games, but rearranging letters to find hidden meaning is one of humanity's oldest word games. For more than two thousand years, anagrams have been treated as art, as mysticism, as a way for scientists to keep secrets, and finally as pure entertainment. The history of anagrams is a surprisingly rich story, and knowing it makes the puzzles more fun to solve. Speaking of which, you can try your own at our anagram puzzles once you've read on.

Ancient origins

The word "anagram" comes from the Greek ana- ("again" or "back") and gramma ("letter"), literally "letters again." The practice is credited to the ancient Greeks, with the poet Lycophron, working in the 3rd century BC, often named as an early practitioner who crafted flattering anagrams of the names of royalty.

The Romans took up the form too, and because Latin was the language of European scholarship for centuries afterward, the anagram tradition carried straight through the medieval and Renaissance periods as a learned pastime.

Anagrams as mysticism

For a long time, anagrams were taken seriously, even spiritually. The belief was that if rearranging the letters of a name or phrase produced a meaningful new message, that message might reveal a hidden truth. This idea shows up in the Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah, which treats the letters of sacred texts as carrying concealed significance.

One of the most famous historical anagrams comes from this religious context. Pontius Pilate's question to Jesus, in Latin "Quid est veritas?" ("What is truth?"), rearranges perfectly into "Est vir qui adest" ("It is the man who is here"), a response hidden inside the question itself. Whether or not it was intentional, it's exactly the kind of "revealed meaning" that gave anagrams their mystical reputation.

The golden age: royal anagrammatists

By the Renaissance, anagrams had become a fashionable art form. Crafting an elegant anagram of a patron's name was a way to flatter the powerful, and the skill was prized. King Louis XIII of France thought so highly of the form that he employed a Royal Anagrammatist, a man named Thomas Billon, whose job was simply to compose anagrams for the court. It's hard to imagine a clearer sign of how seriously the art was once taken.

How scientists used anagrams to keep secrets

Here's the most surprising chapter. In the 17th century, scientists faced a dilemma: they wanted to claim credit for a discovery, but weren't ready to publish it (or wanted more time to be sure). Their clever solution was the anagram. A researcher would scramble a Latin sentence describing the discovery into a meaningless string of letters and publish that. If someone else announced the same finding, the scientist could unscramble their anagram to prove they'd got there first.

• Galileo Galilei used this trick more than once. In 1610 he announced his observation of Saturn's strange shape (its rings, though he couldn't yet tell what they were) as the anagram "smaismrmilmepoetaleumibunenugttauiras," which unscrambled to a Latin sentence meaning "I have observed the highest planet to be triple." He did the same to stake his claim on the phases of Venus.
• Robert Hooke hid his famous law of elasticity as the anagram "ceiiinosssttuv," which he later revealed as "ut tensio, sic vis" ("as the extension, so the force"), the principle we now call Hooke's law.

It was a genuine, if odd, scientific custom, an anagram as a timestamp.

Anagrams become a puzzle

As science developed proper systems for publishing and dating discoveries, the anagram lost its role as a secret-keeper and settled into its modern life: entertainment. Newspapers and magazines turned anagrams into puzzles, the syndicated Jumble (launched in 1954) made daily letter-unscrambling a habit for millions, and computers eventually made it trivial to generate and solve them. What was once mysticism and scientific gamesmanship is now a beloved word game.

Carry the tradition forward

Every time you unscramble a set of letters, you're taking part in a game that's entertained Greek poets, French kings, and Italian astronomers. The puzzle is the same; only the stakes have changed. Try your hand at the modern version with our anagram puzzles, and see the cleverest historical and contemporary examples in our famous anagrams collection.