Rearrange William Shakespeare and you get I am a weakish speller
An anagram reuses every letter of a word or phrase exactly once, and the best ones comment on their source. Shakespeare hides a weakish speller; Tom Marvolo Riddle becomes I am Lord Voldemort. Scholars have used the trick for over two thousand years, to mock, to flatter and to hunt for hidden meanings in scripture.
The word anagram itself shuffles into nag a ram, or into the Latin ars magna, the great art. Someone who makes them is an anagrammatist, and the serious ones aim for results that say something about the original: praise, satire, or a synonym. When the rearrangement means the opposite of its source, the result has its own name, an antigram.
The ancient Greeks used anagrams to seek mystical meaning in names. One tradition credits the poet Lycophron in the third century BCE, though that rests on a 12th-century account by John Tzetzes. Rabbinic interpreters such as Eleazar of Modi'im applied anagrams to the Hebrew Bible, and Kabbalists later embraced the method under the name temurah. In medieval Europe the composer and poet Guillaume de Machaut was a fan.
Latin gave the game its golden age, and the early modern period, especially in Germany, went wild for it. Pilate's question Quid est veritas, what is truth, was famously rearranged to Est vir qui adest, it is the man who is here, the example Samuel Johnson chose for his dictionary. Rules stayed loose: Latin treated I and J, and U and V, as interchangeable, and in 1589 George Puttenham argued in The Art of English Poesie that H was merely a breath, not a true letter. William Camden noted that some practitioners happily swapped E for Æ or C for K when the sense fell nicely.
Courtiers made careers of it. James I's flatterers found a just master hidden in James Stuart, and his son's tutor laboured over multilingual versions of the king's name. Anagrams also turned vicious: during the Overbury murder scandal, loose spelling allowed the victim's name to be twisted into a cry about a busy murder. Because English spelling fixed only slowly, historians have to judge old anagrams by the spellings of their own day.
Source: Anagram
