#Words with alphabetical spellings license#

Others call these particularly apt anagrams 'aptigrams.' For example: Villainousness is an anagram of 'an evil soul's sin.' Grambs uses the word transposal in this general sense, and anagram more narrowly to mean a transposal of letters resulting in synonymous term. The English word anagram goes back to 1589.

#Words with alphabetical spellings license#

in pictures, which they called Rebus.' Popular in autograph books and on vanity license plates, rebuses include such classics as:ĭavid Grambs uses this term for a word or name made up of two identical parts, such as so-so, tom-tom or Pago Pago.Ī word or phrase formed by rearranging the letters of another word or phrase.

Rebus has been used in English since 1605, when William Camden wrote, 'They which lackt wit to expresse their conceit in speech, did vse to depaint it out. Imagine an entire novel without he, she, the, or the past tense marker -ed.Ī representation of words with pictures, letter names, or symbols that suggest the sound of the words. Scott Fitzgerald's Gatsby as great, but in 1939 Ernest Vincent Wright produced the phenomenal Gadsby: A Story of Over 50,000 Words Without Using the letter 'E,' a scarcely believable achievement considering that 'E' is the most common letter in English. Ouch! That mama roo is going to need a pouchlift after carrying around that brood!Ī written work composed of words chosen to avoid the use of one or more letters. Example: encourage contains courage, cog, cur, urge, core, cure, nag, rag, age, nor, rage and enrage. This refers to a word carrying another word within it (without transposing any letters). (Do you get the feeling that fans of word play love to make up words?) Here's a semordnilap dieters can relate to: Stressed is desserts backwards. Semordnilaps (coined by Martin Gardner in 1961) are also known as backronyms, volvograms, heteropalindromes, semi-palindromes, half-palindromes, reversgrams, mynoretehs, recurrent palindromes, reversible anagrams, word reversals, or anadromes. Need more palindromes? Find a huge stash here.Ī word or name that spells a different word backwards (notice what semordnilap spells backwards). Example: A declaration facetiously attributed to Napoleon, 'Able was I ere I saw Elba.' Weird Al Yankovic's song 'Bob' spoofs Bob Dylan's 'Subterranean Homesick Blues' using a slew of palindromes. A word, sentence, or longer written work that reads the same backwards.