What Is an Anagram in Writing?

(Spoiler alert from Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.)

As a poet, I love anagrams, because they're a fun way to play with language and meaning while also dealing with sounds, because anagrams use the same the letters. You may have even played around with anagrams on your own without realizing it.

Sooo...

An anagram is a word or phrase that a writer can form from using the same letters in another word or phrase by shuffling the order of the letters. For instance, the word "sing" can be rearranged as "sign," and that's an anagram.

(Anagrammatic Poetry: Poetic Forms.)

But anagrams can get even more complicated by transposing letters from one phrase to another. For instance, one big moment in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets is when Tom Riddle shares with Harry Potter that the name "Tom Marvolo Riddle" is an anagram of "I am Lord Voldemort."

So anagrams can be fun little word games, for sure, but they can also end up playing pivotal roles in the plots of books.

There are, of course, a wide range of anagrams available to writers, but it's always nice to have some examples to get the brain firing and thinking in anagrams. So here are a few example anagrams to get you started:

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