英语词汇anagram的起源、历史背景-英语词源词典

anagram. An anagram is the rearrangement of the letters of a word or group of words to make another word or group of words, the word anagram itself deriving from the Greek ana graphein, “to write over again.” Popular as wordplay since the earliest times, anagrams were possibly invented by the ancient Jews, and the cabalists, constantly looking for “secret myster- ies . . . woven in the numbers of letters,” always favored them, as did the Greeks and Romans. A famous Latin anagram was an answer made out of the question Pontius Pilate asked in the trial of Jesus. Quid est veritas? (“What is truth”) was the ques- tion, the answer being Est vir qui adest (“It is the man who is here”). Though poet John Dryden called anagrams the “tortur- ing of one poor word ten thousand ways,” the English are among the best and most accurate anagrammatists. Samuel Butler’s novel Erewhon derives its title from the word nowhere, almost spelled backward, and a tribe in the book is called the Sumarongi, which is ignoramus spelled backward. Among the many interchangeable words that can form anagrams in En- glish are evil and live, and eros and rose, but the longest are two 16-letter pairs: conservationists and conversationists; and inter- nationalism and interlaminations. A recent apt anagram sug- gested by Martin Gardner is moon starer, an anagram for astronomer.

词汇	anagram
词源	anagram. An anagram is the rearrangement of the letters of a word or group of words to make another word or group of words, the word anagram itself deriving from the Greek ana graphein, “to write over again.” Popular as wordplay since the earliest times, anagrams were possibly invented by the ancient Jews, and the cabalists, constantly looking for “secret myster- ies . . . woven in the numbers of letters,” always favored them, as did the Greeks and Romans. A famous Latin anagram was an answer made out of the question Pontius Pilate asked in the trial of Jesus. Quid est veritas? (“What is truth”) was the ques- tion, the answer being Est vir qui adest (“It is the man who is here”). Though poet John Dryden called anagrams the “tortur- ing of one poor word ten thousand ways,” the English are among the best and most accurate anagrammatists. Samuel Butler’s novel Erewhon derives its title from the word nowhere, almost spelled backward, and a tribe in the book is called the Sumarongi, which is ignoramus spelled backward. Among the many interchangeable words that can form anagrams in En- glish are evil and live, and eros and rose, but the longest are two 16-letter pairs: conservationists and conversationists; and inter- nationalism and interlaminations. A recent apt anagram sug- gested by Martin Gardner is moon starer, an anagram for astronomer.
随便看	mouse-trap mousse moustache mouth-watering moveable feast movie movie sexperts moving picture moxie mr mr charlie mr clean mr micawber mrs mrs grundy mrs o’leary-s cow mrs president mrs robb-s bonnet mr watson come here: i want you mr w h ms much ado about nothing sleep with the fishes sleuth slice