Train Your Brain with Online Anagrams

If anagrams are your thing, then you doubtless know that Elvis, rearranged, "lives." Others are curiously a lot more accurate: Clint Eastwood reshuffled becomes "Old West Action" and Alec Guinness is "genuine class." These and other delights are Anu Garg's contributions at the Internet Anagram Server.

Garg, who exercises his word genius at home on the "sunny-chilly" shores of Lake Erie, is convinced that inside every set of words is another set anxious to get out. How about former Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, who's name can be rejiggered into "Tipsiness Done Terribly."

You are invited to feed your name -- or anything else, for that matter -- into the Internet Anagram Server's maw, to see what comes out. If it is interesting enough, it could make Anu Garg's Anagram Hall of Fame, which already includes jewels such as astronomers ("moon starers"), the countryside ("no city dirt here") and MacDonalds ("clam and sod").

Click on "Odds 'n Ends" at the site for added bits of esoterica in the world of anagrams and you learn that France's King Louis XIII paid a Royal Anagrammist the equivalent of about $2,000 a year. And something else to puzzle over: the letters in the word "anagram" itself cannot be reshuffled to form another single word.