Interesting anagrams should have a relation with the original.
Example: astronomers = moon-starers (from Hoffmann's Puzzles
Old and New).
Whole sentences can be anagrammed: "the best things in life are free" = "nail-biting refreshes the feet"
The word comes from greek ana=backwards and gramma=letter, so it was initially a word written backwards (example: doom = mood).
Related to anagrams are palindromes:
these are symetric words or whole sentences which remain unchanged (except for spaces between words) if written backwards.
For example, the first words ever spoken form a palindrome: "Madam, I'm Adam". Of cause, the answer was also a palindrome: "Eve"!
Another famous palindrome is the Panama-plan: A man a plan a canal - Panama!
Finally, the fear of palindromes is called: aibohphobia .
There is a newsgroup devoted to anagrams: alt.anagrams
There is a FAQ about this newsgroup, written by Larry Brash: http://www.anagrammy.com/anagrams/index.html
Here are two popular programs:
ANAGRAM GENIUS ( http://www.anagramgenius.com/) is a commercial product by William Tunstall-Pedoe;
WORDPLAY ( http://home.hiwaay.net/~criswell/wordplay/wordplay.html) is a freeware program by Evans A Criswell.
Other programs could be found in the archives of comp.games.sources.
There are also online anagram generators which can be used from the World-Wide Web:
Anagram programs work with a wordlist. That list can be replaced by another one; I tried french and german wordlists from the internet, but to my disappointment I found out that in these languages, it is much rarer to generate meaningful anagrams (one reason is: in english, most words can be used in many contexts, for example "drink" could be a noun or a verb, and as verb it is almost invariant; whereas in other languages, verbs have many different endings, so a random anagram seldomly gives a grammatically correct sentence).
Examples that I generated myself can now be found on several pages, regrouped by subjects:
Here are other funny examples of anagrams I generated:
Created 1996-12-08, Last updated 2003-03-23
Mail any suggestions to email@example.com (Patrick Hahn)