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79-473: An anagram is a word or phrase formed by rearranging the letters of a different word or phrase, typically using all the original letters exactly once. For example, the word anagram itself can be rearranged into the nonsense phrase "nag a ram". The original word or phrase is known as the subject of the anagram. Any word or phrase that exactly reproduces the letters in another order is an anagram. Someone who creates anagrams may be called an "anagrammatist", and

158-455: A majuscule script commonly used from the 3rd to 8th centuries AD by Latin and Greek scribes. Tironian notes were a shorthand system consisting of thousands of signs. New Roman cursive script, also known as minuscule cursive, was in use from the 3rd century to the 7th century, and uses letter forms that are more recognizable to modern eyes; ⟨a⟩ , ⟨b⟩ , ⟨d⟩ , and ⟨e⟩ had taken

237-503: A "dangerous fever", because it created isolation of the author. The surrealist leader André Breton coined the anagram Avida Dollars for Salvador Dalí , to tarnish his reputation by the implication of commercialism. While anagramming is certainly a recreation first, there are ways in which anagrams are put to use, and these can be more serious, or at least not quite frivolous and formless. For example, psychologists use anagram-oriented tests, often called "anagram solution tasks", to assess

316-479: A better telescope than those available to Galileo, figured that Galileo's earlier observations of Saturn actually meant it had a ring (Galileo's tools were only sufficient to see it as bumps) and, like Galileo, had published an anagram, aaaaaaacccccdeeeeeghiiiiiiillllmmnnnnnnnnnooooppqrrstttttuuuuu . Upon confirming his observations, three years later he revealed it to mean Annulo cingitur, tenui, plano, nusquam coherente, ad eclipticam inclinato (Latin: It [Saturn]

395-666: A few cases new verbs are created by appending -ru ( 〜る ) to a noun or using it to replace the end of a word. This is mostly in casual speech for borrowed words, with the most well-established example being sabo-ru ( サボる , cut class; play hooky) , from sabotāju ( サボタージュ , sabotage) . This recent innovation aside, the huge contribution of Sino-Japanese vocabulary was almost entirely borrowed as nouns (often verbal nouns or adjectival nouns). Other languages where adjectives are closed class include Swahili, Bemba , and Luganda . By contrast, Japanese pronouns are an open class and nouns become used as pronouns with some frequency;

474-439: A given language): Within a given category, subgroups of words may be identified based on more precise grammatical properties. For example, verbs may be specified according to the number and type of objects or other complements which they take. This is called subcategorization . Many modern descriptions of grammar include not only lexical categories or word classes, but also phrasal categories , used to classify phrases , in

553-419: A given word form can often be identified as belonging to a particular part of speech and having certain additional grammatical properties . In English, most words are uninflected, while the inflected endings that exist are mostly ambiguous: -ed may mark a verbal past tense, a participle or a fully adjectival form; -s may mark a plural noun, a possessive noun, or a present-tense verb form; -ing may mark

632-513: A kingly symbol), where Armand de Richelieu became Ardue main d'Hercule ("difficult hand of Hercules"). Examples from the 19th century are the transposition of " Horatio Nelson " into Honor est a Nilo (Latin: Honor is from the Nile ); and of " Florence Nightingale " into "Flit on, cheering angel". The Victorian love of anagramming as recreation is alluded to by the mathematician Augustus De Morgan using his own name as an example; "Great Gun, do us

711-598: A large number of these programs are available on the Internet. Some programs use the Anatree algorithm to compute anagrams efficiently. The program or server carries out an exhaustive search of a database of words, to produce a list containing every possible combination of words or phrases from the input word or phrase using a jumble algorithm . Some programs (such as Lexpert ) restrict to one-word answers. Many anagram servers (for example, The Words Oracle ) can control

790-578: A more familiar shape, and the other letters were proportionate to each other. This script evolved into a variety of regional medieval scripts (for example, the Merovingian , Visigothic and Benevantan scripts), to be later supplanted by the Carolingian minuscule . It was not until the Middle Ages that the letter ⟨ W ⟩ (originally a ligature of two ⟨ V ⟩ s)

869-485: A name truly written into his letters, as his elements, and a new connection of it by artificial transposition, without addition, subtraction or change of any letter, into different words, making some perfect sense appliable (i.e., applicable) to the person named." Dryden in MacFlecknoe disdainfully called the pastime the "torturing of one poor word ten thousand ways". "Eleanor Audeley" , wife of Sir John Davies ,

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948-624: A participle, gerund , or pure adjective or noun. Although -ly is a frequent adverb marker, some adverbs (e.g. tomorrow , fast , very ) do not have that ending, while many adjectives do have it (e.g. friendly , ugly , lovely ), as do occasional words in other parts of speech (e.g. jelly , fly , rely ). Many English words can belong to more than one part of speech. Words like neigh , break , outlaw , laser , microwave , and telephone might all be either verbs or nouns. In certain circumstances, even words with primarily grammatical functions can be used as verbs or nouns, as in, "We must look to

1027-672: A popular Latin anagram against the Jesuits : Societas Jesu turned into Vitiosa seces (Latin: Cut off the wicked things). Puttenham, in the time of Elizabeth I , wished to start from Elissabet Anglorum Regina (Latin: Elizabeth Queen of the English), to obtain Multa regnabis ense gloria (Latin: By thy sword shalt thou reign in great renown); he explains carefully that H is "a note of aspiration only and no letter", and that Z in Greek or Hebrew

1106-406: A proper noun or personal name into an appropriate sentence: They can change part of speech , such as the adjective "silent" to the verb "listen". "Anagrams" itself can be anagrammatized as "Ars magna" (Latin, 'the great art'). Anagrams can be traced back to the time of the ancient Greeks, and were used to find the hidden and mystical meaning in names. They were popular throughout Europe during

1185-596: A recent example is jibun ( 自分 , self) , now used by some as a first-person pronoun. The status of Japanese pronouns as a distinct class is disputed, however, with some considering it only a use of nouns, not a distinct class. The case is similar in languages of Southeast Asia, including Thai and Lao, in which, like Japanese, pronouns and terms of address vary significantly based on relative social standing and respect. Some word classes are universally closed, however, including demonstratives and interrogative words. Roman alphabet The Latin alphabet , also known as

1264-467: A sentence, for instance). New verbal meanings are nearly always expressed periphrastically by appending suru ( する , to do) to a noun, as in undō suru ( 運動する , to (do) exercise) , and new adjectival meanings are nearly always expressed by adjectival nouns , using the suffix -na ( 〜な ) when an adjectival noun modifies a noun phrase, as in hen-na ojisan ( 変なおじさん , strange man) . The closedness of verbs has weakened in recent years, and in

1343-503: A separate class), adjectives , adverbs and interjections . Ideophones are often an open class, though less familiar to English speakers, and are often open to nonce words . Typical closed classes are prepositions (or postpositions), determiners , conjunctions , and pronouns . The open–closed distinction is related to the distinction between lexical and functional categories , and to that between content words and function words , and some authors consider these identical, but

1422-628: A separate part of speech, and numerals are often conflated with other parts of speech: nouns ( cardinal numerals , e.g., "one", and collective numerals , e.g., "dozen"), adjectives ( ordinal numerals , e.g., "first", and multiplier numerals , e.g., "single") and adverbs ( multiplicative numerals , e.g., "once", and distributive numerals , e.g., "singly"). Eight or nine parts of speech are commonly listed: Some traditional classifications consider articles to be adjectives, yielding eight parts of speech rather than nine. And some modern classifications define further classes in addition to these. For discussion see

1501-466: A sum!" is attributed to his son William De Morgan , but a family friend John Thomas Graves was prolific, and a manuscript with over 2,800 has been preserved. With the advent of surrealism as a poetic movement, anagrams regained the artistic respect they had had in the Baroque period . The German poet Unica Zürn , who made extensive use of anagram techniques, came to regard obsession with anagrams as

1580-449: Is pronouns , prepositions , and the article ). By the end of the 2nd century BCE, grammarians had expanded this classification scheme into eight categories, seen in the Art of Grammar , attributed to Dionysius Thrax : It can be seen that these parts of speech are defined by morphological , syntactic and semantic criteria. The Latin grammarian Priscian ( fl. 500 CE) modified

1659-399: Is a mere SS. The rules were not completely fixed in the 17th century. William Camden in his Remains commented, singling out some letters— Æ , K, W, and Z—not found in the classical Roman alphabet : The precise in this practice strictly observing all the parts of the definition, are only bold with H either in omitting or retaining it, for that it cannot challenge the right of a letter. But

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1738-476: Is allowed to be an anagram of "Arouet, l[e] j[eune]" (U = V, J = I) that is, "Arouet the younger". Other examples include: Several of these are "imperfect anagrams", letters having been left out in some cases for the sake of easy pronunciation. Anagrams used for titles afford scope for some types of wit. Examples: In Hebrew, the name " Gernot Zippe " (גרנוט ציפה), the inventor of the Zippe-type centrifuge ,

1817-466: Is an anagram of the word "centrifuge" (צנטריפוגה). The sentence "Name is Anu Garg", referring to anagrammer and founder of wordsmith.org Anu Garg , can be rearranged to spell "Anagram genius". Anagrams are in themselves a recreational activity, but they also make up part of many other games, puzzles and game shows. The Jumble is a puzzle found in many newspapers in the United States requiring

1896-727: Is found from the earliest moments in the history of linguistics . In the Nirukta , written in the 6th or 5th century BCE, the Sanskrit grammarian Yāska defined four main categories of words: These four were grouped into two larger classes: inflectable (nouns and verbs) and uninflectable (pre-verbs and particles). The ancient work on the grammar of the Tamil language , Tolkāppiyam , argued to have been written around 2nd century CE, classifies Tamil words as peyar (பெயர்; noun), vinai (வினை; verb), idai (part of speech which modifies

1975-400: Is normally seen as part of the core language and is not expected to change. In English, for example, new nouns, verbs, etc. are being added to the language constantly (including by the common process of verbing and other types of conversion , where an existing word comes to be used in a different part of speech). However, it is very unusual for a new pronoun, for example, to become accepted in

2054-541: Is reflected in the older English terminology noun substantive , noun adjective and noun numeral . Later the adjective became a separate class, as often did the numerals, and the English word noun came to be applied to substantives only. Works of English grammar generally follow the pattern of the European tradition as described above, except that participles are now usually regarded as forms of verbs rather than as

2133-598: Is said to have been brought before the High Commission in 1634 for extravagances, stimulated by the discovery that her name could be transposed to "Reveale, O Daniel", and to have been laughed out of court by another anagram submitted by Sir John Lambe , the dean of the Arches , "Dame Eleanor Davies", "Never soe mad a ladie". An example from France was a flattering anagram for Cardinal Richelieu , comparing him to Hercules or at least one of his hands (Hercules being

2212-563: Is standardised as the ISO basic Latin alphabet . The term Latin alphabet may refer to either the alphabet used to write Latin (as described in this article) or other alphabets based on the Latin script , which is the basic set of letters common to the various alphabets descended from the classical Latin alphabet, such as the English alphabet . These Latin-script alphabets may discard letters, like

2291-482: Is surrounded by a thin, flat, ring, nowhere touching, inclined to the ecliptic). When Robert Hooke discovered Hooke's law in 1660, he first published it in anagram form, ceiiinosssttuv , for ut tensio, sic vis (Latin: as the extension, so the force). Anagrams are connected to pseudonyms, by the fact that they may conceal or reveal, or operate somewhere in between like a mask that can establish identity. For example, Jim Morrison used an anagram of his name in

2370-579: Is today transcribed Lūciī a fīliī was written ⟨ lv́ciꟾ·a·fꟾliꟾ ⟩ in the inscription depicted. Some letters have more than one form in epigraphy . Latinists have treated some of them especially such as ⟨ Ꟶ ⟩ , a variant of ⟨H⟩ found in Roman Gaul . The primary mark of punctuation was the interpunct , which was used as a word divider , though it fell out of use after 200 AD. Old Roman cursive script, also called majuscule cursive and capitalis cursive,

2449-414: Is unfounded, or not applicable to certain languages. Modern linguists have proposed many different schemes whereby the words of English or other languages are placed into more specific categories and subcategories based on a more precise understanding of their grammatical functions. Common lexical category set defined by function may include the following (not all of them will necessarily be applicable in

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2528-529: The African reference alphabet . Although Latin did not use diacritical marks, signs of truncation of words (often placed above or at the end of the truncated word) were very common. Furthermore, abbreviations or smaller overlapping letters were often used. This was due to the fact that if the text was engraved on stone, the number of letters to be written was reduced, while if it was written on paper or parchment, it saved precious space. This habit continued even in

2607-747: The Middle Ages , for example with the poet and composer Guillaume de Machaut . They are said to date back at least to the Greek poet Lycophron , in the third century BCE; but this relies on an account of Lycophron given by John Tzetzes in the 12th century. In the Talmudic and Midrashic literature, anagrams were used to interpret the Hebrew Bible , notably by Eleazar of Modi'im . Later, Kabbalists took this up with enthusiasm, calling anagrams temurah . Anagrams in Latin were considered witty over many centuries. Est vir qui adest , explained below,

2686-562: The Roman alphabet , is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language . Largely unaltered excepting several letters splitting—i.e. ⟨J⟩ from ⟨I⟩ , and ⟨U⟩ from ⟨V⟩ —additions such as ⟨W⟩ , and extensions such as letters with diacritics , it forms the Latin script that is used to write most languages of modern Europe , Africa , America and Oceania . Its basic modern inventory

2765-702: The Rotokas alphabet , or add new letters, like the Danish and Norwegian alphabets. Letter shapes have evolved over the centuries, including the development in Medieval Latin of lower-case , forms which did not exist in the Classical period alphabet. The Latin alphabet evolved from the visually similar Etruscan alphabet , which evolved from the Cumaean Greek version of the Greek alphabet , which

2844-594: The age of colonialism and Christian evangelism , the Latin script spread beyond Europe , coming into use for writing indigenous American , Australian , Austronesian , Austroasiatic and African languages . More recently, linguists have also tended to prefer the Latin script or the International Phonetic Alphabet (itself largely based on the Latin script) when transcribing or creating written standards for non-European languages, such as

2923-457: The hows and not just the whys ." The process whereby a word comes to be used as a different part of speech is called conversion or zero derivation. Linguists recognize that the above list of eight or nine word classes is drastically simplified. For example, "adverb" is to some extent a catch-all class that includes words with many different functions. Some have even argued that the most basic of category distinctions, that of nouns and verbs,

3002-431: The implicit memory of young adults and adults alike. Natural philosophers (astronomers and others) of the 17th century transposed their discoveries into Latin anagrams, to establish their priority. In this way they laid claim to new discoveries before their results were ready for publication. Galileo used smaismrmilmepoetaleumibunenugttauiras for Altissimum planetam tergeminum observavi (Latin: I have observed

3081-534: The American " chaise lounge " by metathesis (transposition of letters and/or sounds). It has also been speculated that the English "curd" comes from the Latin crudus ("raw"). Similarly, the ancient English word for bird was "brid". The French king Louis XIII had a man named Thomas Billon appointed as his Royal Anagrammatist with an annual salary of 1,200 livres . Among contemporary anagrammers, Anu Garg , created an Internet Anagram Server in 1994 together with

3160-571: The Anagram or Posy Transposed in The Art of English Poesie (1589). As a literary game when Latin was the common property of the literate, Latin anagrams were prominent. Two examples are the change of Ave Maria , gratia plena, Dominus tecum (Latin: Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord [is] with you) into Virgo serena, pia, munda et immaculata (Latin: Serene virgin , pious, clean and spotless ), and

3239-765: The Doors song " L.A. Woman ", calling himself "Mr. Mojo Risin'". The use of anagrams and fabricated personal names may be to circumvent restrictions on the use of real names, as happened in the 18th century when Edward Cave wanted to get around restrictions imposed on the reporting of the House of Commons . In a genre such as farce or parody , anagrams as names may be used for pointed and satiric effect. Pseudonyms adopted by authors are sometimes transposed forms of their names; thus " Calvinus " becomes "Alcuinus" (here V = U) or " François Rabelais " = "Alcofribas Nasier". The name " Voltaire " of François Marie Arouet fits this pattern, and

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3318-487: The Licentiats somewhat licentiously, lest they should prejudice poetical liberty, will pardon themselves for doubling or rejecting a letter, if the sence fall aptly, and "think it no injury to use E for Æ; V for W; S for Z, and C for K, and contrariwise. When it comes to the 17th century and anagrams in English or other languages, there is a great deal of documented evidence of learned interest. The lawyer Thomas Egerton

3397-831: The Middle Ages. Hundreds of symbols and abbreviations exist, varying from century to century. It is generally believed that the Latin alphabet used by the Romans was derived from the Old Italic alphabet used by the Etruscans . That alphabet was derived from the Euboean alphabet used by the Cumae , which in turn was derived from the Phoenician alphabet . Latin included 21 different characters. The letter ⟨C⟩

3476-549: The Romans did not use the traditional ( Semitic -derived) names as in Greek: the names of the plosives were formed by adding /eː/ to their sound (except for ⟨K⟩ and ⟨Q⟩ , which needed different vowels to be distinguished from ⟨C⟩ ) and the names of the continuants consisted as a rule either of the bare sound, or the sound preceded by /e/ . The letter ⟨Y⟩ when introduced

3555-557: The above eightfold system, excluding "article" (since the Latin language , unlike Greek, does not have articles) but adding " interjection ". The Latin names for the parts of speech, from which the corresponding modern English terms derive, were nomen , verbum , participium , pronomen , praepositio , adverbium , conjunctio and interjectio . The category nomen included substantives ( nomen substantivum , corresponding to what are today called nouns in English), adjectives (nomen adjectivum) and numerals (nomen numerale) . This

3634-475: The alphabet. From then on, ⟨G⟩ represented the voiced plosive /ɡ/ , while ⟨C⟩ was generally reserved for the voiceless plosive /k/ . The letter ⟨K⟩ was used only rarely, in a small number of words such as Kalendae , often interchangeably with ⟨C⟩ . After the Roman conquest of Greece in the 1st century BC, Latin adopted the Greek letters ⟨Y⟩ and ⟨Z⟩ (or readopted, in

3713-437: The anagrammatic answer to Pilate 's question, Quid est veritas? (Latin: What is truth?), namely, Est vir qui adest (Latin: It is the man who is here). The origins of these are not documented. Latin continued to influence letter values (such as I = J, U = V and W = VV). There was an ongoing tradition of allowing anagrams to be "perfect" if the letters were all used once, but allowing for these interchanges. This can be seen in

3792-464: The connection is not strict. Open classes are generally lexical categories in the stricter sense, containing words with greater semantic content, while closed classes are normally functional categories, consisting of words that perform essentially grammatical functions. This is not universal: in many languages verbs and adjectives are closed classes, usually consisting of few members, and in Japanese

3871-523: The figures of Cynthia [= the moon]). In both cases, Johannes Kepler had solved the anagrams incorrectly, assuming they were talking about the Moons of Mars ( Salve, umbistineum geminatum Martia proles ) and a red spot on Jupiter ( Macula rufa in Jove est gyratur mathem ), respectively. By coincidence, he turned out to be right about the actual objects existing. In 1656, Christiaan Huygens , using

3950-547: The formation of new pronouns from existing nouns is relatively common, though to what extent these form a distinct word class is debated. Words are added to open classes through such processes as compounding , derivation , coining , and borrowing . When a new word is added through some such process, it can subsequently be used grammatically in sentences in the same ways as other words in its class. A closed class may obtain new items through these same processes, but such changes are much rarer and take much more time. A closed class

4029-534: The fragmentation of political power, the style of writing changed and varied greatly throughout the Middle Ages, even after the invention of the printing press . Early deviations from the classical forms were the uncial script , a development of the Old Roman cursive , and various so-called minuscule scripts that developed from New Roman cursive , of which the insular script developed by Irish literati and derivations of this, such as Carolingian minuscule were

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4108-471: The future Charles I, worked hard on multilingual anagrams on the name of father James. A notorious murder scandal, the Overbury case, threw up two imperfect anagrams that were aided by typically loose spelling and were recorded by Simonds D'Ewes : "Francis Howard" (for Frances Carr, Countess of Somerset , her maiden name spelled in a variant) became "Car findes a whore", with the letters E hardly counted, and

4187-447: The goal of a serious or skilled anagrammatist is to produce anagrams that reflect or comment on their subject. Anagrams may be created as a commentary on the subject. They may be a parody, a criticism or satire. For example: An anagram may also be a synonym of the original word. For example: An anagram that has a meaning opposed to that of the original word or phrase is called an "antigram". For example: They can sometimes change from

4266-473: The language, even in cases where there may be felt to be a need for one, as in the case of gender-neutral pronouns . The open or closed status of word classes varies between languages, even assuming that corresponding word classes exist. Most conspicuously, in many languages verbs and adjectives form closed classes of content words. An extreme example is found in Jingulu , which has only three verbs, while even

4345-457: The latter case) to write Greek loanwords, placing them at the end of the alphabet. An attempt by the emperor Claudius to introduce three additional letters did not last. Thus it was during the classical Latin period that the Latin alphabet contained 21 letters and 2 foreign letters: The Latin names of some of these letters are disputed; for example, ⟨H⟩ may have been called [ˈaha] or [ˈaka] . In general

4424-439: The method they used. Anagrams constructed without the aid of a computer are noted as having been done "manually" or "by hand"; those made by utilizing a computer may be noted "by machine" or "by computer", or may indicate the name of the computer program (using Anagram Genius ). There are also a few "natural" instances: English words unconsciously created by switching letters around. The French chaise longue ("long chair") became

4503-655: The modern Indo-European Persian has no more than a few hundred simple verbs, a great deal of which are archaic. (Some twenty Persian verbs are used as light verbs to form compounds; this lack of lexical verbs is shared with other Iranian languages.) Japanese is similar, having few lexical verbs. Basque verbs are also a closed class, with the vast majority of verbal senses instead expressed periphrastically. In Japanese , verbs and adjectives are closed classes, though these are quite large, with about 700 adjectives, and verbs have opened slightly in recent years. Japanese adjectives are closely related to verbs (they can predicate

4582-408: The more letters involved the more difficult this becomes. The difficulty is that for a word of n different letters, there are n ! ( factorial of n ) different permutations and so n ! − 1 different anagrams of the word. Anagram dictionaries can also be used. Computer programs, known as "anagram search", "anagram servers", "anagram solvers", offer a much faster route to creating anagrams, and

4661-469: The most distant planet to have a triple form) for discovering the rings of Saturn in 1610. Galileo announced his discovery that Venus had phases like the Moon in the form Haec immatura a me iam frustra leguntur oy (Latin: These immature ones have already been read in vain by me -oy), that is, when rearranged, Cynthiae figuras aemulatur Mater Amorum (Latin: The Mother of Loves [= Venus] imitates

4740-426: The most influential, introducing the lower case forms of the letters, as well as other writing conventions that have since become standard. The languages that use the Latin script generally use capital letters to begin paragraphs and sentences and proper nouns . The rules for capitalization have changed over time, and different languages have varied in their rules for capitalization. Old English , for example,

4819-514: The name of a type of businessman . Numerous other games and contests involve some element of anagram formation as a basic skill. Some examples: Multiple anagramming is a technique used to solve some kinds of cryptograms, such as a permutation cipher , a transposition cipher , and the Jefferson disk . Solutions may be computationally found using a Jumble algorithm . Sometimes, it is possible to "see" anagrams in words, unaided by tools, though

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4898-494: The relationships between verbs and nouns), and uri (word that further qualifies a noun or verb). A century or two after the work of Yāska, the Greek scholar Plato wrote in his Cratylus dialogue , "sentences are, I conceive, a combination of verbs [ rhêma ] and nouns [ ónoma ]". Aristotle added another class, "conjunction" [ sýndesmos ], which included not only the words known today as conjunctions , but also other parts (the interpretations differ; in one interpretation it

4977-869: The satirical anagram-based newspaper The Anagram Times . Mike Keith has anagrammed the complete text of Moby Dick . He, along with Richard Brodie, has published The Anagrammed Bible that includes anagrammed version of many books of the Bible. Popular television personality Dick Cavett is known for his anagrams of famous celebrities such as Alec Guinness and Spiro Agnew. Thy genius calls thee not to purchase fame In keen iambics, but mild anagram: Leave writing plays, and choose for thy command Some peaceful province in acrostic land. There thou may'st wings display and altars raise, And torture one poor word ten thousand ways. Part of speech Other terms than part of speech —particularly in modern linguistic classifications, which often make more precise distinctions than

5056-768: The search results, by excluding or including certain words, limiting the number or length of words in each anagram, or limiting the number of results. Anagram solvers are often banned from online anagram games. The disadvantage of computer anagram solvers, especially when applied to multi-word anagrams, is their poor understanding of the meaning of the words they are manipulating. They usually cannot filter out meaningful or appropriate anagrams from large numbers of nonsensical word combinations. Some servers attempt to improve on this using statistical techniques that try to combine only words that appear together often. This approach provides only limited success since it fails to recognize ironic and humorous combinations. Some anagrammatists indicate

5135-495: The sections below. Additionally, there are other parts of speech including particles ( yes , no ) and postpositions ( ago , notwithstanding ) although many fewer words are in these categories. The classification below, or slight expansions of it, is still followed in most dictionaries : English words are not generally marked as belonging to one part of speech or another; this contrasts with many other European languages, which use inflection more extensively, meaning that

5214-662: The sense of groups of words that form units having specific grammatical functions. Phrasal categories may include noun phrases (NP), verb phrases (VP) and so on. Lexical and phrasal categories together are called syntactic categories . Word classes may be either open or closed. An open class is one that commonly accepts the addition of new words, while a closed class is one to which new items are very rarely added. Open classes normally contain large numbers of words, while closed classes are much smaller. Typical open classes found in English and many other languages are nouns , verbs (excluding auxiliary verbs , if these are regarded as

5293-680: The traditional scheme does—include word class , lexical class , and lexical category . Some authors restrict the term lexical category to refer only to a particular type of syntactic category ; for them the term excludes those parts of speech that are considered to be function words , such as pronouns. The term form class is also used, although this has various conflicting definitions. Word classes may be classified as open or closed : open classes (typically including nouns, verbs and adjectives) acquire new members constantly, while closed classes (such as pronouns and conjunctions) acquire new members infrequently, if at all. Almost all languages have

5372-425: The unscrambling of letters to find the solution. Cryptic crossword puzzles frequently use anagrammatic clues, usually indicating that they are anagrams by the inclusion of a descriptive term like "confused" or "in disarray". An example would be Businessman burst into tears (9 letters) . The solution, stationer , is an anagram of into tears , the letters of which have burst out of their original arrangement to form

5451-431: The various letters see Latin spelling and pronunciation ; for the names of the letters in English see English alphabet . Diacritics were not regularly used, but they did occur sometimes, the most common being the apex used to mark long vowels , which had previously sometimes been written doubled. However, in place of taking an apex, the letter i was written taller : ⟨ á é ꟾ ó v́ ⟩ . For example, what

5530-471: The victim Thomas Overbury , as "Thomas Overburie", was written as "O! O! a busie murther" (an old form of "murder"), with a V counted as U. William Drummond of Hawthornden , in an essay On the Character of a Perfect Anagram , tried to lay down rules for permissible substitutions (such as S standing for Z) and letter omissions. William Camden provided a definition of "Anagrammatisme" as "a dissolution of

5609-434: The word classes noun and verb, but beyond these two there are significant variations among different languages. For example: Because of such variation in the number of categories and their identifying properties, analysis of parts of speech must be done for each individual language. Nevertheless, the labels for each category are assigned on the basis of universal criteria. The classification of words into lexical categories

5688-527: Was added to the Latin alphabet, to represent sounds from the Germanic languages which did not exist in medieval Latin, and only after the Renaissance did the convention of treating ⟨ I ⟩ and ⟨ U ⟩ as vowels , and ⟨ J ⟩ and ⟨ V ⟩ as consonants , become established. Prior to that, the former had been merely allographs of the latter. With

5767-687: Was cited as the example in Samuel Johnson 's A Dictionary of the English Language . They became hugely popular in the early modern period , especially in Germany. Any historical material on anagrams must always be interpreted in terms of the assumptions and spellings that were current for the language in question. In particular, spelling in English only slowly became fixed. There were attempts to regulate anagram formation, an important one in English being that of George Puttenham 's Of

5846-512: Was itself descended from the Phoenician alphabet , which in turn derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs . The Etruscans ruled early Rome ; their alphabet evolved in Rome over successive centuries to produce the Latin alphabet. During the Middle Ages , the Latin alphabet was used (sometimes with modifications) for writing Romance languages , which are direct descendants of Latin , as well as Celtic , Germanic , Baltic and some Slavic languages . With

5925-465: Was praised through the anagram gestat honorem ('he carries honor'); the physician George Ent took the anagrammatic motto genio surget ('he rises through spirit/genius'), which requires his first name as Georgius . James I's courtiers discovered in "James Stuart" "a just master", and converted "Charles James Stuart" into "Claims Arthur 's seat " (even at that point in time, the letters I and J were more-or-less interchangeable). Walter Quin, tutor to

6004-419: Was probably called "hy" /hyː/ as in Greek, the name upsilon not being in use yet, but this was changed to i Graeca ("Greek i") as Latin speakers had difficulty distinguishing its foreign sound /y/ from /i/ . ⟨Z⟩ was given its Greek name, zeta . This scheme has continued to be used by most modern European languages that have adopted the Latin alphabet. For the Latin sounds represented by

6083-600: Was rarely written with even proper nouns capitalized, whereas Modern English writers and printers of the 17th and 18th century frequently capitalized most and sometimes all nouns; for example, from the preamble of the United States Constitution : We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote

6162-445: Was the everyday form of handwriting used for writing letters, by merchants writing business accounts, by schoolchildren learning the Latin alphabet, and even emperors issuing commands. A more formal style of writing was based on Roman square capitals , but cursive was used for quicker, informal writing. It was most commonly used from about the 1st century BC to the 3rd century, but it probably existed earlier than that. It led to Uncial ,

6241-439: Was the western form of the Greek gamma , but it was used for the sounds /ɡ/ and /k/ alike, possibly under the influence of Etruscan , which might have lacked any voiced plosives . Later, probably during the 3rd century BC, the letter ⟨Z⟩ – not needed to write Latin properly – was replaced with the new letter ⟨G⟩ , a ⟨C⟩ modified with a small vertical stroke, which took its place in

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