Anagram

An anagram is a word or phrase formed by rearranging the letters of another word or phrase, using all the original letters exactly once. Anagrams may involve single words or longer phrases, and when rearranging, spaces, punctuation, and capitalization are usually ignored.

Etymology: The term derives from Greek ana- "again" and gráphein "to write." In English, the concept has long been explored in word games and linguistic puzzles.

Examples include listen becoming silent; astronomer becoming moon starer; dormitory becoming dirty room. Phrases such as funeral meaning real fun are popular demonstrations of word-level anagrams. Some anagrams preserve the original meaning, while others create playful or surprising results.

Variants include perfect or complete anagrams, which use all letters, and phrase anagrams, which may ignore spaces and punctuation. Antigrams are anagrams that yield phrases with opposite or contrasting sense. Anagrams appear in puzzles, literature, and popular culture, and are studied in linguistics and computer science.

Computationally, checking whether two strings are anagrams can be done by counting letter frequencies or by sorting the letters. Applications include puzzle solvers and cryptographic demonstrations, while manual anagramming remains a common pastime and educational tool.